Roots, Game and a Bit of Honesty: Inside The Bull's 2026 Winter Menu

There's a point in mid-October when a pub kitchen stops pretending. The tomatoes go, the basil goes, and somebody has to decide what the next five months are going to taste like. At The Bull in Wargrave, that decision landed on 1 November, when the 2026 winter menu quietly replaced its late-summer predecessor.

We spent a fortnight drifting in and out of the kitchen, the cellar and a couple of genuinely freezing farmyards to work out how a menu like this gets built. The short answer: slowly, argumentatively, and with a lot of tasting spoons.

Let the season do the talking

"November is the most honest month to cook in," says head chef Marcus Ridley, who has run The Bull's kitchen since 2021. "Everything that's any good is either still in the ground or already hanging. You're not decorating anything. You're just trying not to get in the way."

That ethos runs right through the new card. Roughly seven in ten ingredients come from within about thirty miles of the pub, and the menu is deliberately short — six starters, seven mains, four puddings — so that the kitchen can buy whole animals and whole crates rather than tidy little boxes. It also means the menu isn't fixed in stone: two game dishes will rotate depending on what the shoot brings in, and the vegetable side changes when the grower's field does.

"We're not evangelists about food miles," Ridley adds, a touch defensively. "We still use lemons and olive oil and chocolate. We're just careful about the things that actually grow here. If a parsnip was lifted nine miles away on a Tuesday, it tastes better on a Thursday than one that's spent a week in a lorry. That's not ideology, that's lunch."

The dishes, roughly in order

Celeriac velouté, chestnut, pickled walnut. The opening act is a proper winter warmer — celeriac roasted before it's blitzed, so the soup carries a bit of sweetness, finished with a spoon of chestnut cream and a scatter of pickled walnuts that cut through the richness. A drizzle of cold-pressed rapeseed oil, made a few villages over, does the job olive oil usually does.

Chalk stream trout, brown butter, pink fir potatoes. Light enough for a starter, generous enough that two people at the bar ordered it as a main on the night we visited. The fish is cured briefly, then finished in a hot pan and dressed with butter, capers and a little horseradish.

Partridge, bacon, leek and a bread sauce croquette. This is the dish the kitchen is proudest of. The bird is roasted on the crown and carved to order; the legs are braised down and folded into the croquette with the bread sauce, which is a neat little trick that means nothing on the plate goes to waste.

Beef short rib, swede, horseradish cream. Slow-braised for the best part of a day, served off the bone with a swede purée sweet enough to surprise you and a horseradish cream that's been dialled back so it doesn't shout over everything else.

Roast cauliflower, hazelnut, sherry and bay. The vegetarian main is not an afterthought, and it deserves saying. Whole cauliflower, roasted hard until the florets go dark at the edges, with a hazelnut and sherry dressing and a bay-infused cream.

Puddings. A quince and almond tart that will only be on while the quinces last (more on that below), a treacle sponge that arrives with a genuinely irresponsible amount of clotted cream, and a damson ripple ice cream made in-house that has already developed a small and slightly alarming following.

The people behind the parsnips

Ask Ridley who grows what and he produces a laminated list from his back pocket, which tells you most of what you need to know.

The vegetables come largely from a family-run market garden just outside Twyford, now in its third season supplying the pub. "They ring me on a Monday and tell me what's ready, and I write the specials around that," he says. "It's the wrong way round to how most kitchens work and it's much better."

The beef comes from a native-breed herd on the Berkshire Downs, aged by a butcher in Reading. The trout is reared in the chalk-stream country to the west. The bread — including the sourdough that turns up with the whipped butter — is baked in Henley and delivered on the morning it's sold, and a small cheesemaker out Wantage way supplies two of the four British cheeses on the board.

The quinces are the best story. They come from a garden on Station Road, three streets from the pub door, from a couple who had more fruit than they knew what to do with and asked whether the kitchen might want some. It now amounts to roughly forty kilos a year, and when they run out, the tart comes off the menu.

In the glass

The wine list has been quietly shortened and made more interesting. There's a proper showing for English sparkling — a nod to the fact that the chalk under this part of the country is the same seam that made Champagne famous — plus a few gutsier reds for the short rib and the game. On the hand pulls, the guest ale rotates weekly and there's been a marked rise in people ordering a half alongside a glass of something cold.

For the drivers and the Tuesday crowd, the low-and-no list is no longer an apology. There's a decent alcohol-free stout on draught and a couple of properly made soft options, which is more than most pubs of this size can claim.

Eating here, not just dining here

The winter menu isn't only for the dining room. Everything on it can be ordered in the bar, at the long table by the window, or at the slightly-too-close-to-the-fire seats that regulars fight over from October onwards. Sunday lunch continues alongside, with the beef, a bird and a vegetarian roast, and a reduced midweek set menu at lunchtimes that has become the default for the village's retired-and-not-quite-retired contingent.

What to expect, and when

The 2026 winter menu runs until late February 2027, with game dishes changing as the season allows and the vegetable sides shifting with the weather. The kitchen has asked us to say, politely but firmly, that the quince tart cannot be guaranteed — if you see it, order it.

Tables can be booked through the website, and walk-ins are genuinely welcome in the bar, though on a Friday in December you'd be brave to rely on it. Winter in Wargrave is short on daylight and long on reasons to sit down somewhere warm with a slow-cooked something and a glass of red. This menu is a fairly persuasive one.