Restaurant Review, The Bluebell Inn, Henley-in-Arden.

The Bluebell Inn, 93 High Street, Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire B95 5AT

Contact: 01564 793049; bluebellhenley.co.uk

Price: Three courses with wine and coffee: about £50 per head

Not since the Emperor Claudius, on what would prove his final supper, glanced up to see an eagle encircling the imperial gardens with a skull-and-crossbones-emblazoned phial in its talons has a culinary outing been as ill-omened as the one which concerns us today.

My last attempt to review the Bluebell Inn ended not just in frustration but within inches of death, when an exploded cambelt caused the car to stop suddenly in the fast lane of the rush-hour M6. While I cannot deny that watching lorries swerve at the last second to avoid you in the rear view mirror does wonders for a sluggish adrenal gland, once will suffice.

Doomy portent No 2 concerns the friends who recommended it. The last time I actually made it to a restaurant they suggested, it went into liquidation a few days later. But for a last-minute warning from the photographer, I would have reviewed a newly deceased restaurant for a second time – there again, once is more than enough.

“Do you reckon,” I asked my friends, on reaching Henley-in-Arden with an amalgam of relief and trepidation, “that there is a better than even-money chance of this one surviving until the review is published? Only experience teaches me that readers can be peeved when they turn up to be greeted by a sign advising creditors whom to contact to recover two bob in the pound.”

Read more at http://www.telegraph.co.uk