Mark Butcher looks back on his year at the helm of the White Hart in Wytham

We have just completed our first year at the White Hart of Wytham and, we think, have got to first base in our ambition to become one of the foremost dining pubs in Oxfordshire, renowned for outstanding hospitality and great food.

It’s been an exciting and challenging first year, requiring deep pockets and many hands to the beer pumps and cellar pumps.

Early one Sunday morning in January, I arrived to find our cellar with two feet of flood water and over 100 people coming to have Sunday lunch in three hours’ time.

Within 10 minutes the sirens of Oxfordshire Fire & Rescue could be heard approaching the village drowning out the church bells and awakening the rest of the village from their slumbers. Within the hour the flooding had gone and we opened promptly at midday. As we say “there are several beers in” for the Watch of that morning.

In the context of this pub, one year is but a few small pebbles of Chesil Beach – since we can trace landlords back to the 1740s – when the pub was a coaching inn just off the main London Way that then ran just below Wytham Woods. Our Georgian cobbled floor stable block no longer provides for those hungry and weary coach horses – but instead for all varieties of guests with something to celebrate.

The stone floors of our bar room, with its roaring open log fire, also tell of a history of hospitality. Whilst in recent years this may have been somewhat chequered the comment we heard most often these past few months is “I used to come here several years ago, and I’m so glad it’s now back on the map”.

In the month of January and early February, our sales have been up 40 per cent on the same period last year – scotching the theory that January is a dry month and that the Oxford roadworks have stopped people coming anywhere near here.

The appeal of the pub is of course much connected with Wytham’s reputation as the quintessential English village, with its beautiful Cotswold stone houses and thatched roofs, All Saints church, abbey and the magnificent and ancient Wytham Woods.

It has a community that we are proud to be part of, a gentlemanly cricket club (that we’re sponsoring this year) as well as orchards, gardens and hedgerows that have allowed us to feast and forage. Venison, squirrel, rabbit, quince, nettles duck eggs and blackberries are but a few things that have made it on to our menus over the past year – all from within a few hundred yards of our kitchen.

This month our winter menu will be changing – the stars of which have been wild mushroom profiteroles with creamed leeks and tapenade crusted fillet of cod, red pepper coulis and lyonnaise potatoes. On March 12 we’re hosting a special evening “Know your Alabarino from your Einset” with guest speaker Suzy Atkins, wine expert on BBC One Saturday Kitchen and a four-course dinner including our own Smoked Wytham Venison sausages and Norwegian Skrie cod.

Come April the building of our outside bar – to serve our beautiful secluded courtyard – will be completed and the Asado Argentine grill will be firing up soon afterwards to provide, weather permitting, al fresco dining at its best.

White Hart, Wytham, Oxford OX2 8QA whitehartwytham.com
Tel: 01865 244372.