Hidden charms

By Tom Evans, Chester Chronicle

Calveley Arms

There are an awful lot of words for 'hungry'. Having fasted since 9am in preparation for this meal, I was going through them all. Starving, famished, ravenous - you name it, I felt it.
 
It was one of those evenings when fate had it in for me. I appeared to press the 'red traffic light' button as soon as I approached a set of lights and directions from a well-known website was making the estimate of 24 minutes from home to food look increasingly optimistic.
 
It didn't help that the directions ended abruptly somewhere on the A41 and told us to 'use maps to get to the end of the route'. Well, thank you. If we'd wanted to use maps, we'd have used maps from the start.
 
We realised we'd gone too far, asked directions, were sent to a different pub, asked directions there, got re-routed several miles back to where we'd just come from and finally found the Calve-ley Arms. For some reason, there was a deer made of twigs covered with fairy lights by the door. We liked it.
 
The staff didn't mind that we were late. They must get a lot of customers who use this particular website. In fact, they seemed taken aback by the very sight of us - we lowered the average age in there by about 30 years.
 
We were shown to a cosy little candlelit alcove and given our menus. In an unusual move, my menu was pasted on to the inside cover of a hardback book entitled The Incredible Holiday Activity Book. Erica's was in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles annual. What with this and the fairy-lights-twig-deer, we thought we were in for an interesting evening.
 
The specials selection was vast, bigger than some places' main menus. It was mostly traditional country pub fare with the odd foreign dish thrown in and a huge selection of seafood, supplied fresh daily by Nick Brickland of Chester. One dish promised damson jam from the garden of the pub's neighbour, Barry. You don't get that at KFC.
 
Of the starters, I was smitten by the hot avocado and stilton - a popular choice, apparently - while Erica chose the butternut squash and ginger soup.