On the ball

Jun 30 2006 By Tom Evans, Chester Chronicle

The Rising Sun

IT isn't easy being a sports widow, like my wife.

Saturday afternoons between August and May I spend in the company of Jeff Stelling and friends on Sky Sports News, while my Saturday evenings belong to Gary Lineker and his Match of the Day buddies.

Ask me to nip to the shops in my lunch hour to get something for tea and it'll disappear into the deepest recesses of my subconscious; ask me what a particular underachieving third-tier football team were doing at this precise moment 15 years ago and I'll give you chapter, verse and attendance figures.

I should have put an extra clause in Erica's wedding vows: 'I promise to love, honour, obey and not bat an eyelid when you spend about two thirds of our summer holiday of 2005 checking your mobile phone to see if Ricky Ponting's out yet.'

And don't even get me started on World Cup summers, when words like 'metatarsal' become part of my everyday vocabulary and the quality of Portugal's midfield keeps me awake at night.

But she puts up with it somehow, so tonight's her night. That's right - even though USA and Italy are lining up in Kaiserslauten, we're heading for Tarporley.

The Rising Sun is a country pub with a big-city menu and small-town home-liness. Its two cosy dining rooms cram in about thirty diners apiece but its menu is huge and sprawling.

The décor is classic country pub - Toby jugs in the shape of sailors' heads, brass fawns and Wedgwood pottery. It's quite charming, particularly the unopened hand-written envelopes addressed to the family owners lying on the Welsh dresser. You really feel like you're in somebody's home, a million miles from the cold anonymity of city centre chain restaurants.

Word had spread about its vegetarian options, which is what attracted us. My wife isn't a vegetarian, she just doesn't like meat very much. Most restaurants' veggie options you can recite without even looking at the menu - curry, chilli and pasta with tomato sauce. The nearest dedicated vegetarian restaurant to Chester is - you can look this up - in Altrincham. But the Rising Sun offers a dozen or so vegetarian main courses of great variety.

Crucially, not all of them include mushrooms. My wife doesn't like mushrooms either, which makes eating out doubly difficult. Most restaurants seem to see mushrooms as something of a meat substitute, here, they're more likely to be found in the meat dishes. Which is a shame, as I can't stand them either.