Is the gastropub making a meal of it?

The pub is part of our culture and its food need be no more complex than a pork pie, says Tom Norrington-Davies

Nothing facilitates a comeback here like a bit of unabashed anglophilia. Take Madonna, for example. She is now "county" enough to have riding accidents. Hot on the tail of her Barbour jacket comes Egon Ronay. The introduction to his 2006 restaurant guide is a homage to the "gastropub". What promises to be "a heart warming and very British success story" is lots more fun than that because it is also a little bit rude about the French.

Gastropubs, Ronay asserts, are giving bistros a run for their money. The waiters are nicer; the dishes are better value; the viveur is more bon - I'm sure you get the picture. This is the poetic justice bit in a rags-to-riches tale of British cookery. That many people assume Egon Ronay is French adds to the general sense of a coup. In fact, he is Hungarian.

As a true child of gastro-pubbery, I've been fascinated by the media flurry. Let me explain. About 10 years ago, as a young cook, I took a job at The Eagle on Farringdon Road in London. Opened in 1991 by Mike Belben and David Eyre, it is well documented as the first of its kind. The scuffed wooden floors, open-plan kitchen, simple, robust food and menus on blackboards have become the template for the gastropub. The assertion that there is one on every high street is still some way from the truth, but more and more open every year.

But is the gastropub necessarily a good thing? Ronay's guide paints a slightly quaint and unrealistic vision of Britain blessed with any number of family-run, family-friendly hostelries serving real ale and real food. In order to qualify his ardour, he is mildly sniffy about the word gastropub. He describes it as a less than ideal term. Like most cooks and landlords I know, I wish he'd been braver. We hate the G word.

London listings magazine Time Out has called gastro and pub a "queasy coupling of words", but I always blamed them for coining the expression in the first place. Whenever I hear the G word, I think of its Eighties equivalent: the "wine bar". Both expressions imply that to be any good a pub must become "something else".

This desire to create "something else" has led to any number of boozers being given some quite alarming makeovers in recent years: if a pub near you has been "gastroed", you will know what I mean: the bare wood, big windows, zinc-top bar. If you are lucky, the look will be accompanied by some decent cooking: the landlord having sourced his chef as carefully as his authentically rickety chairs. If not, it will be vacuum-packed duck a l'orange or instant phad thai.

Even if the food is exemplary, there is no guarantee that the venture will last. I know of many places that, despite widespread critical acclaim, have closed within two years of opening. Yaser Martini, a surveyor with Fleuret's, the people to go to if you are looking for licensed premises, believes that in its present form the gastropub is unsustainable.

"Too many people armed with a little knowledge and a lot of enthusiasm have flocked to the industry," he tells me. "They fail to realise that it costs at least 10 times as much to open a pub as it did back in the early Nineties. This is partly because canny investors bought up loads of sites when they saw the rent potential. "On top of that, many people fail to realise that this is not a business with huge profit margins. It is worth noting that more and more failed pubs end up as blocks of flats these days.

The problem is largely one of concept. Because the early versions were seen as reinventions of the traditional boozer, people now think they need to innovate like mad to be noticed. In my view, the opposite is true. The pub is an ancient part of our culinary heritage. Putting decent food into the equation is simply restoring it to a former glory. That food needn't be any more "gastronomic" than a well-made ploughman's lunch or pork pie. It is ironic, but the enthusiasm for French bistros and Italian trattoria that inspired the first wave of gastropubs has taught us a lot about our own culinary heritage. Simple food is good if it is made with the best, often locally sourced ingredients. You don't need sandblasted walls or a pizza oven to produce it.

How to spot if your local has been gastroed

Real gastropub owners don't ditch quaint names like ''the ugly olde trout'' for faux rustic nonsense like ''bar med''.
Are the waiting staff wearing Bluetooth-like devices underneath all that just-out-of-bed hair? Any technological innovation exposes a steely commercial nerve centre somewhere behind the scenes.
Laminated menus are a no-no. So are specials. You can't have specials without an à la carte that is set in stone.
How permanent is the chalk on that blackboard? If it doesn't rub off, be afraid. Real gastropubs change their menus with masochistic frequency - sometimes during the middle of frantic lunchtimes.
Can you hear the gentle ping of a microwave craftily hidden from view?
Can the chef look you in the eye and tell you where his salmon last leapt or his pheasant last foraged? If not, stick to the olives.