Restaurant review, The White Oak, The Pound, Cookham, Berkshire.

Cookham is one of those charmed towns: a place in the English countryside where the houses are beautiful, the shops are chi-chi and dogs gambol on the green. Oh, and a river runs through it. When I was growing up, it was somewhere we drove to for a spot of rubber-necking from a hired rowing boat.

On one of the first days that hints at spring, I drive back out to Cookham to see if it's still as idyllic. It is. And now it's getting the attentions of hoteliers and restaurateurs who – quite rightly – sense money in them there lawns.

If I'd waited a week, I could have had lunch at the nearby hotel Sanctum on the Green, which is in the news because 18-year-old Luke Thomas launches his restaurant there this Wednesday. But I think that's somewhere to visit once the novelty of a teenager running a smart dining-room has worn off (hopefully to settle into a fine destination).

I'm at The White Oak, one of three "country pubs and eating houses" – the others are the Greene Oak in Windsor and the Three Oaks in Gerrards Cross – owned by Henry and Katherine Cripps, who obviously know where and how the affluent like to dine out.

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