More top chefs want pubs

An increasing number of top celebrity chefs are taking on their own pubs to offer customers the best in traditional cooking, according to food writer Susan Nowak in the newly-published Good Beer Guide 2007.

Antony Worrall Thompson, Jean-Christophe Novelli, Heston Blumenthal, Phil Vickery and Roxy Beaujolais will soon be joined by Gordon Ramsay, who plans to run a chain of pubs with a focus on good food.

Most of the chefs insist that the presence of cask beers on the bar is an essential ingredient of a pub which offers traditional, well-cooked food.

Jean-Christophe Novelli's White Horse in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, has two cask ales to accompany many a "peasant dish", such as stuffed pigs' trotters and oxtail braised with liquorice.

In the Good Beer Guide he says: "I think you are guaranteed to be more relaxed in a pub. I'm doing a lot of things that I would not have permitted myself before, but cooking should not be to a formula."

And Antony Worrall Thompson has a double mission - to improve pub food and save village and community pubs. He runs the Lamb at Satwell, Oxfordshire, and is joint proprietor of the Angel in Heytesbury, Wiltshire, and the Greyhound in Rotherfield Peppard, Oxfordshire.

He says: "So many pubs are being sold off as private houses and the centres of villages have been ripped out. I have Fuller's London Pride as a house beer, but I also like to support local breweries such as Brakspear, Butler's and Loddon."

Antony Worrall Thompson says he loathes the term "gastropub" and has told his chefs to be "less poncy - more bistro".