The St Quintin Arms, Harpham: 'I ate at a Yorkshire pub serving proper old-fashioned pies - I can't wait for my next utterly unhealthy visit'

The St Quintin Arms in Harpham is now serving a selection of pies featuring proper, flaky, thick, old-fashioned, gravy-absorbing, heart-clogging suet crusts.

Bliss was it that dawn to be alive, if I may entirely misappropriate Wordsworth.

Mad as it sounds, we haven’t had anywhere doing suet crust pies since the Gait at Millington changed hands a couple of years back and the best pie in the world was foolishly retired from their menu. The Riding has been suet-less from that day to this.

And it’s been missed. Dear god, has it been missed.

My arteries may have completely unfurred as a result of this absence, but I’d rather the inside of my blood vessels look like an untrimmed Womble pelt than be refused regular access to a juicy steak pie with a suet-packed lid.

Fear not, I shall return to Pieville anon, but I suppose I best bring you up to speed with all things St Quintin.

My only previous visit to Harpham was six or seven years ago, when the pub was run by Ian and Zoe Burdass and specialised in stout, Yorkshire cookery with an emphasis on lamb as the couple used to farm sheep.

The Burdasses left the pub but still live next door and are regular visitors. From what I remember of Ian, he won’t lack for opinions on how the pub is now run.

There then appears to have been an extended period where the next custodians of the pub tried to turn it into some sort of wedding venue.

Whenever I checked, the website seemed very weddingy and featured pictures of marquees and heavily decorated tablecloths covered in glittery stuff. A move that looked to me like it would only provide limited success.

The menu, meanwhile, looked extremely uninspiring. I mentally wrote the pub off.

Now, all has changed again. Since last Autumn, the St Quintin Arms has been under the stewardship of Chris Jones and Nicola Copeland.

Nicola has some experience in catering, but Chris ran successful IT firms. After selling up and retiring, the couple went to look for somewhere to live near their seaside town of choice, Bridlington.

But, as anyone who’s ever tried to retire to Brid knows, it’s far easier to buy a pub in a bucolic village 20 miles away.

Chris and Nicola are exactly the sort of people you want running a pub – confident, keen and welcoming. They have plans to turn the land out back into a glamping paradise, which should see them right during the summer months.

To drag punters in come the nip of winter, they’re working on the food. And a solid start they’ve made of it.

Pie aside, for starters we enjoyed a tastier-than-average leek and tatty soup and a crispy lamb salad that wasn’t quite what I was expecting but was light and delicious and didn’t fill me too much to detract from the sublime experience to come.

Other mains on the menu included bangers and mash, fish and chips and the usual pub fayre. Nothing wrong with any of it, the plates we watched march past us to other tables all looked generously portioned and perfectly enticing.

But we went for pie (obviously) and the butcher’s pork chop with mashed tatty and apple and caramelised onion sauce.

The pork chop was thick and large and juicy. A well-presented, swiftly devoured treat. The real star player was the pie, however.

Decent steak chunks cooked until all fall-aparty and chunky skin-on chips, with some welcome veg offered on the side in a valiant-but-fruitless attempt to offset the harm done to your health by the crowning glory of the crust.

It can sometimes be tricky to cook a suet crust without it flopping into a limp layer of goo. Here, it arrives absolutely perfect. Flaky and golden on top and below, moist and slowly soaking up the juices from the meat underneath.

At least a couple of inches thick, it was possibly the first suet crust I’ve had since before the pandemic. Consequently, there is a chance that absence has made the heart grow more forgiving, but I think it more likely that the St Quintin is simply serving up a magnificent pie.

The plan, apparently, is for the menu to always offer up three types of pie with three options of crust – flaky, shortcrust and suet.

I’ll bet any of you that suet outsells the others ten-to-one. Only those under direct orders from their cardiologist would eschew it for a lesser option.

Puds are grand, too. A superb raspberry soufflé with raspberry coulis and a raspberry cheesecake with homemade ice cream from the creamery in the village. All very raspberry-y.

A full complement of fine dishes can only leave me thinking Chris and Nicola are running the right kind of regime in the kitchen.

Prices are fair – £6 to £10 for starters and puds, with mains starting at £15 and rising to £30 plus for the posher cuts of steak – and there are plans to offer pork pie and peas and chunky sandwiches at lunchtime to attract the walkers and cyclists making their way past or through the village.

They may have just a few months experience running a pub but the new team at St Quintin Arms are doing Harpham proud while proving a focal point for all of us under-served suetitians.

The pub isn’t perfect yet, but the faults are few and forgivable and I can see the place absolutely flying once the entire set up is in its full stride.

I look forward to my next utterly unhealthy visit. My arteries are obviously less keen.

Welcome 4/5

Food 4/5

Atmosphere 3/5

Prices 4/5

St Quintin Arms, Harpham, Driffield, YO25 4QY

www.stquintin-arms.com

Open: Tues to Sunday, 9am to 11.30am