Time was when the trajectory of the English rock star involved hitting a middle-aged junction with two, simply-navigated options. With your spandex trousers, worryingly-younger wife and perm-friendly blowdryer in tow, you could either head to a tax haven in the South of France or, if the 98 per cent income tax burden of the Harold Wilson years didn’t concern your accountant, you moved to a leafy, riverside neighbourhood just beyond Slough. To Ascot, Bray, Esher or Henley-on-Thames. You became a ‘country gentleman’, wearing fisherman’s jumpers to the local pub and recording albums in your lavish home studio that were of ever-decreasing relevance to the general public.

Creatively-pungent urban-blight surrenderers to have relocated to this near-corner of the Home Counties in order to gain paunches and endure expensive divorces have included most members of The Who, George Harrison and Eric Clapton. That this bucolic stretch of England is only half-an-hour’s drive from the drug dealers of Hounslow is, we can only speculate, pure coincidence.

Chefs, when they hit middle age, don’t tend to retire to the country as readily. Most top cooks prefer to stay in the capital until they drop their last spatula. If you’re the hottest young thing behind the stove, then a middle-aged move to a gastropub in Berkshire would almost certainly be met with raised eyebrows rather than the mild pity that’s bestowed upon washed-up bass guitarists.

Heston Blumenthal had his own methods for dealing with this conundrum. He simply never became particularly wedded to the capital in the first place, buying a country pub in Bray, Berkshire, when he was in his mid-30s. The Hind’s Head sits next door to The Fat Duck, a restaurant whose influence and repute need no culinary mansplaining here.

You don’t hear nearly so much of Heston these days. Now 57, his days of being the awkward-looking mainstay of Channel Four reality shows – the nation dribbling and bickering over his snail porridge, bacon-and-egg ice cream and aerated beetroot – feels rather cosy compared to the current restaurant climate of utility bill-prompted bankruptcies and the insidious growth of corporate ‘box parks’ masquerading as grassroots gastronomic ventures.

Blumenthal has owned the pub-grub-friendly The Hind’s Head for almost as long as he’s been in the public eye. And it’s this concomitant to the spectacular success of The Fat Duck that reveals the two most axiomatic, but least mentioned, motifs of the man behind the meat fruit.

Firstly, that, far from being the ‘Nutty Professor’ of gastronomy, Blumenthal has always been, at heart, a middle-aged traditionalist. Blumenthal is second only to Nigel Slater in his adoration for food’s ability to emit potent nostalgia for our childhoods, real or imagined. He may use gels and liquid nitrogen at The Fat Duck, but the DNA of his dishes is always somewhere between a 1970s Berni Inn and what your nan would cook up in the kitchen of her pebble-dashed bungalow.

The second is that Blumenthal is a child of Lyon rather than a scion from some culinary divinity from outer space. No other place on earth commits itself with more élan to turbo-charging the flavours of the bouchons of that French city than the kitchens of Blumenthal; from their bacon, crouton and poached egg-smothered Lyonnaise salads, to their foies de volaille in béchamel sauce.

Blumenthal is the Anglicised lovechild of a bouchon veteran and a Lancashire grandmother; and it’s these core values, rather than all that noughties-era molecular gastronomy, that hold sway at The Hind’s Head.

An Elizabethan coaching inn, upstairs the pub is a foppish milieu of antler chandeliers and Deco-ish curved sofas. Downstairs is better, with panelled wood the colour of boarding-school gravy and a wonky, central bar that serves real ales.

Heston has tried, and pretty much succeeded, at making this space look more boozer than gastropub (the world’s most annoying portmanteau until ‘labradoodle’ came along). The dishes themselves, without exception, avert the need for mad, scientific gambols thanks to an old-fashioned commitment to raising the flavour-ometer to breaking point.

The ham hock croquettes had a blistered, glassbreaking snap-and-crackle to them that almost entirely removed the need for the accompanying sauce gribiche. The mushroom parfait on grilled campaillou bread (the crustiest, most rustic loaf that France can offer) was a mousse bolder than a Just Stop Oil protester, yet with a rather more pleasing fervency on the tongue.

A main of spring tart was unimpeachably good, a perky gathering, rather than a fussy mélange, of asparagus royale, pickled lemon, wild garlic and peas that burst in my mouth like endless, congratulatory flashbulbs.

The Merrifield duck breast came in two railway sleeper-sized, perfectly rare slabs, with grilled asparagus, wild garlic and a green coffee pulp that made for a fabulous dipping sauce for the triple-cooked chips. These crunched like a Range Rover over gravel but had a plump and fluffy filling so soft that I feel hotels should start filling their mattresses with them.

If The Hind’s Head is a manifestation of Blumenthal growing more comfortable with the bricolage of middle age then the Government should start paying us all to visit as part of a National Standards of Ageing Well campaign.

Ironically, in the midst of the hanging baskets and biscuit-tin folderol of Bray, Heston’s apothegm of a pub menu is, in probably the most quintessentially middle-aged village in England, giving us the most exciting lesson in how to grow old flavourfully.

Visit hindsheadbray.com

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