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10 articles
At The Bull in Wargrave, the most revealing part of the menu is not the headline dish but the row of jars behind the pass. We followed one batch of house piccalilli from a late-season glut to a small ramekin at the edge of the plate, and asked whether a condiment can say more about a kitchen than a main course ever will.
A pub pudding has a different job from a restaurant dessert. It has to land after a roast, a pint or a wet walk along the towpath — and it has to do so without demanding a second sitting, a sommelier or a pair of tweezers. At The Bull, that means sticky toffee, possets, cheese and the fruit people actually order.
A £16 main at a village pub can look like a simple sum: ingredients plus a bit of profit. In reality, it is a stack of small, stubborn costs — supplier runs, kitchen hours, oil, energy and the wastage bin. Here is a plain-English look at how a plate gets its price at The Bull, and how to read a menu more sharply without losing the pleasure of ordering.
Three regulars, three festive sandwiches and one scoring sheet built to separate good bread from beautiful nonsense. Here is what survived the December 2026 bar menu test at The Bull in Wargrave.
The fortnight after Bonfire Night is not the pub calendar's glamour slot. But at The Bull in Wargrave, it is where game arrives, root vegetables take over and the specials board starts to loosen its collar — and where locals can eat some of the year's most interesting cooking without a Christmas menu in sight.
Eating alone in a village pub on a Tuesday is not a sad compromise — it is one of the last genuinely civilised things left to do with an hour and a half. An argument for the table for one, plus a short guide to ordering, drinking and not apologising for any of it.
A proper pub snack is not a starter in disguise. It is the salty handshake that buys you time before the main event. Here is our entirely reasonable, mildly argumentative ranking of nine bar snacks judged on salt, crunch, shareability and how well they survive a second pint.
The best ingredient list in Berkshire is not written in our kitchen — it is scattered across farm gates, orchard rows and a yard off the A4 within ten miles of the village. Here are eight producers we keep coming back to, and the plates they end up on.
Sunday lunch is the test a village pub never quite stops sitting. Here is what a year of gravy jugs, crackling, Yorkshire puddings and blunt regulars' notes has taught The Bull about getting the roast right.
The Bull in Wargrave changed over to its winter menu at the start of November 2026. We spent a fortnight in the kitchen, the cellar and several cold farmyards to find out what's on the plate, who grew it, and why the whole thing tastes so resolutely like Berkshire in the cold.