Sebastiaan Evans

"There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."— Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Most people picture the Thames as it runs through London, broad and busy beneath its famous bridges. But the river begins its life far from all that, winding quietly through the water meadows of the Cotswolds, and some of its loveliest reaches are right here on our doorstep in Faringdon. We have teamed up with our friends at Cotswold Boat Hire so that...

A good steak dinner is one of those meals that sounds simple but is surprisingly hard to get right. The meat matters, obviously, but so does the cut, the ageing, the cooking, and the setting. Oxfordshire is not short of places that put a steak on the menu, but the places that do it properly, with well-sourced beef and the kitchen skill to match, are fewer than you might expect. Steak at The Old Crown At The Ballroom Restaurant, our approach to steak reflects our approach to everything else:...

There was a time when vegetarian dining in an Oxfordshire pub meant a mushroom risotto or a goat's cheese tart that had clearly been on the menu since 2006. That time has passed. The county's better kitchens now treat vegetable-led cooking as an opportunity rather than an afterthought, and several are doing it exceptionally well. How We Approach It at The Old Crown At The Ballroom Restaurant, our menu changes every six to eight weeks, and there are always multiple vegetarian dishes that...