Restaurant, 10/10 for Cumbria's L’Enclume.

L’Enclume, Cavendish St, Cartmel, Cumbria LA11 6PZ

Contact: 01539 536362, lenclume.co.uk

Tasting menu £89 plus wine

My sole complaint about a 17-course lunch of eye-opening, palate-thrilling brilliance at L’Enclume, tucked away on the edge of lakeland in the Cumbrian town of Cartmel, was the absence of snot. Or rather, to be pedantically precise, “snot”.

One assumed that the green amuse-bouche which drew that succinct description in The Trip – the BBC series in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon ate their way across northern England trading Sean Connery impressions and marinating in middle-aged introspection – was guaranteed a place on the ever-changing menu by the grace of its television stardom alone. Yet “snot” came there none. Having gone to the trouble and cost (£1.89!) of downloading the episode, I found this a swizz.

This was not the quibble I expected. The complaint I had anticipated was Tasting Menu Buttock – the psychosomatic ailment whereby one or both cheeks throb from tension and impatience as the waiter offers long, tedious expositions of dish after teeny-weeny dish.

My last serious bout of TMB came at Roganic, L’Enclume’s central London pop-up sibling, where a spiel about the butter made Fidel Castro seem like a paragon of concision. The waiters at L’Enclume are no more laconic. “Old boy,” said my cousin Nick on this low-rent Trip (strong on the midlife whining, not so hot on the Connery impressions) after a lengthy introduction to a trio of minuscule dumplings, “they do go on a bit.” They do, but who could blame them for rhapsodising when the food is scintillating enough to moonlight as a buttock anaesthetic?

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