Restaurant review: Stovell's, Surrey.

125 Windsor Road, Chobham, Surrey (01276 858 000). Meal for two, including wine and service: £120

Surrey needs Stovell's. It needs a few other things besides – charm, wit, a reality check – but Stovell's is far more than just a good start. It's an outpost of civilisation, a place for sensible cooking which doesn't take itself too seriously. Lurking deep below its vaguely proper demeanour, its tightly laced corsets, there's also an instinct for the dirtier, baser things in food.The room may be all Farrow & Ball beige walls. It may be all crisp linen and tasteful paintings of mushrooms and very lovely ceramics. But there is also, sitting in the middle of that room, a whole leg of Pata Negra ham, the fat glistening, the meat the colour of a box at the opera. There's a little pot of lamb dripping that comes alongside their (very good) breads as an alternative to the soft, salty smoked butter. There is a note in the menu about the prehistoric joys of cooking over wood. If there is a criticism it is that this interest in a grubbier kind of food feels a little overwhelmed at the moment by the demands of local polite society.Perhaps it's the Surrey effect. Blimey, but it's an odd place. I don't mean this as an insult to all the interesting, forward-thinking, lovely liberal people who live there. It's all the other ones, the miserable sods who live surrounded by manicured lawns and carriage-drive garlanded houses, who drive four-by-fours and their nannies to distraction. The ones who have all that money and carefully calibrated taste, and yet for the life of them can't support an interesting crop of restaurants. There's Drake's at Ripley and a handful of gastro pubs, all of them perming a menu from goat's cheese, risotto, sea bass, pork belly, chocolate fondants and lemon tarts. The offering is staggeringly dull. And I know, because I spent days researching it, until I fell asleep face down on the keyboard, dribbling. I still have the space bar mark on my cheek.

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