The Old Crown Coaching Inn

A Market Town Inn That Takes Its Kitchen Seriously

Faringdon sits in the Vale of the White Horse, a stretch of Oxfordshire that sits closer to the Cotswolds edge than to Oxford proper, and its Market Place has the unhurried quality of a town that has not needed to reinvent itself for visitors. The Old Crown Coaching Inn occupies one side of that square, and its 16th-century facade gives little away about what has happened inside since the current owners began a substantial renovation. What they have produced is a layered destination: a ballroom hung with modern art and wrought iron chandeliers, a cocktail and wine bar pitched at a register well above the average country pub, and a kitchen now operating at a level that makes it worth planning a trip around rather than stumbling upon.

Where the Produce Leads

The cooking under Sam Squires sits within a broader movement in British country-house dining that takes classical French technique and applies it to the seasonal rhythms of the English larder. This approach has defined the better end of rural British restaurants for a generation, from the kind of kitchens represented by Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons in Great Milton and Gidleigh Park in Chagford down through the increasingly strong cohort of market-town kitchens that have quietly closed the gap. The difference at this level is often a matter of what the kitchen chooses to source and how honestly it handles those ingredients.

At The Old Crown, the evidence of that sourcing logic shows up in the structure of the menu itself. Game pie appears alongside beetroot tartare dressed with dill oil, raspberry, and nasturtium, two dishes that share an insistence on produce with character rather than neutral commodity ingredients. The game pie is served with piccalilli and fresh herbs, a combination that acknowledges the acidity needed to cut through dense, well-seasoned pastry. The nasturtium on the tartare is a culinary herb that has moved from fine-dining flourish to a marker of kitchen gardens and regional foraging supply chains. Neither dish reads as trend-chasing; both read as a kitchen that knows what grows locally and when.

Among the mains, the beef cheek and onion suet pie with creamed savoy cabbage and red wine jus is the dish that most directly speaks to the English tradition of long-braised secondary cuts. Cheek cookery requires time and patience over spectacle, and a suet pastry crust demands technical confidence that many kitchens avoid precisely because it is unforgiving. Duck breast atop potato rösti with carrot and orange purée and sherry jus represents a slightly more continental register, the kind of combination that classical French training would produce when working with British birds. Both sit within a menu that leans heavily toward meat, which reflects both the availability of quality reared livestock in the surrounding county and the preferences of a rural clientele.

The fish section is where the kitchen shows its range most clearly. Battered cod offers an accessible entry point, but the bouillabaisse riff is a more ambitious proposition: Atlantic cod, mussels, and clams in a broth that historically required a specific provençal pantry, reinterpreted here with herb crumb, rouille, and saffron potato. Bouillabaisse adaptations have become a useful test of a British kitchen's confidence with coastal produce and classical French frameworks. Doing one well requires sourcing shellfish at the right specification and building depth in the stock, neither of which can be faked at the table. The presence of this dish on a menu in a Wiltshire-adjacent market town signals a kitchen willing to take on technically demanding reference points rather than defaulting to safer, crowd-pleasing fish cookery.

The Tasting Menu and Why It Matters Here

The tasting menu at The Old Crown, running Wednesday to Saturday evenings and requiring advance booking, places it in a specific tier of the English country restaurant. Tasting menus in rural settings are a deliberate signal: they tell you the kitchen has the confidence to hold a table for two to three hours, that the sourcing programme is complex enough to justify a sequence of courses, and that the team is organised around a longer service arc. Comparable kitchens operating the same format in this part of England include Hand and Flowers in Marlow and, at a higher price tier, venues such as Midsummer House in Cambridge. The Old Crown sits below those in terms of scale and recognition, but operates with a similar logic: the à la carte carries the volume, the tasting menu carries the ambition.

Desserts are not an afterthought. A blackberry and yoghurt baked Alaska requires precise timing and an understanding of temperature contrast that gives away whether a pastry section is taking the same care as the savoury kitchen. A salted dark chocolate délice with orange and cardamom ice cream is a less theatrical but technically demanding finish, the cardamom adding a specificity that lifts the combination out of generic chocolate dessert territory.

Sunday Lunch as a Distinct Occasion

Sunday lunch at British country inns exists on a spectrum from perfunctory roast to genuinely considered meal, and The Old Crown's has received consistent recognition as the latter. In the context of the regional dining scene, that matters: Sunday lunch is often where ingredient quality is most visible, because the format is familiar enough that there is nowhere to hide behind novelty. A kitchen that sources well will show it on a Sunday, and the reputation here suggests that is what is happening.

Planning Your Visit

The tasting menu runs Wednesday to Saturday evenings and books ahead: treat it as you would any reservation at a kitchen operating at this level and plan at least a few weeks out, more if you have a specific date in mind. The à la carte and Sunday lunch formats offer more flexibility, though a venue of this profile in a small market town will fill its dining room on weekend afternoons without difficulty. The ballroom and cocktail bar make The Old Crown a viable choice for groups who want to extend an evening, and the variety of formats, from bar snacks through to a multi-course tasting sequence, means it handles mixed-intent tables reasonably well. Faringdon is accessible by car from Oxford in under 30 minutes and sits on the edge of the Oxfordshire Cotswolds, making it a natural anchor point for a day spent in that corridor.