In January of last year, Kingham was named favourite village in England by the discerning readers of Country Life. At the time, the Plough pub did not contribute significantly to its reputation, at least as far as foodies were concerned. In the edition announcing Kingham's success, the magazine declared baldly: "A traditional drinking pub. No food, except sandwiches."

All this was to alter in days, however, with the arrival of new owner Emily Watkins, fresh from a stint as sous chef at Heston Blumenthal's temple of experimental cuisine, The Fat Duck, in Bray. After a careful sprucing up designed to reveal the ancient building at its best, the pub was reopened as the Kingham Plough. Its mission was to place food at the forefront of the business (while not forgetting the beer-supping locals), with the emphasis on dishes made from properly sourced ingredients, many of them local.

Emily does not attempt to imitate the food-as-science approach that has characterised Blumenthal's work, but admits to being inspired by his imaginative blending of flavours. Her menus are not large but change daily - no, twice daily - as part of a challenging determination to provide the freshest and best. Some stuff, including lamb and cheese, comes from celebrity neighbour Alex James, the former bass player with Blur. He now has a farm and is proving as well-versed in country matters of the conventional kind as he was (to judge from his autobiography) in those to which Shakespeare refers in Hamlet.

From next month, the pub will be open seven days a week, so you will gather that Emily is not afraid of hard work. Talking to her after our excellent dinner last Friday, I was impressed by her evident enthusiasm for good food, and the way she is able to use her warm personality to share this enthusiasm with her customers. Combine all this with her good looks and one could forecast, should she wish it, a notable career as a celebrity chef. (I said the same 30 years ago about Raymond Blanc.) But enough of this flattery . . . Well, perhaps not quite - Jack Russell Ooti would certainly not forgive me if I were not to say straightaway how big a contribution her companionship made to the enjoyment of our meal. I can't decide whether she or Emily's other dog, Yorkie-cross Monkey, was the more appealing.

I booked by phone earlier in the day and was advised that the restaurant was full but there was room in the bar. No problem; Rosemarie and I are bar people. We arrived to find four or five other tables of diners, two of them family groups with markedly well-behaved children. Ours was ready at the farthest remove from the bar, where we settled and began study of the menu.

Since there was not a vast and bewildering choice, I can tell you first what we didn't have, before moving on to what we did. In the first category were starters of wild garlic soup, with snails and roasted portabella mushroom, and crisp duck egg, with bacon and watercress sauce; and main courses of fillet of beef with salad, venison haunch with pear and turnip mash, and goat's cheese mousse with lettuce and peas.

I began with organic cured salmon, which was served in small pieces aboard a crouton cooked in butter with a lemon-dressed herb salad and "hollandaise". I place the hollandaise within inverted commas because it turned out, in fact, to be a lightly poached egg yolk placed on top of the salmon, in the way a raw yolk is positioned on steak tartare. Emily explained later that this was a Blumenthal-ish touch, encouraging the eater to create, in effect, his or her own hollandaise, by blending the yolk with the other ingredients.

Since I don't eat eggs, I merely passed it to Rosemarie, who had a nibble of it with her delicious chicken and ham hock terrine, in a wrapping of leek. She continued with a superb Cotswold lamb pudding - chunks of lean meat in a tomatoey sauce, encased in a crumbly suet pastry. This more than made up for the beef and ale pudding that had been 'sold out' on our Easter Monday visit to Witney Lakes.

My choice was fish - chunks of beautifully fresh hake and monkfish, teamed with lightly cooked warm cockles, still in their shells. Their taste transported me back nearly 50 years, to delicious family teas that followed cockling expeditions on the North Norfolk coast - complete with the grating of sand. A rich tomato stew, crunchy green sea vegetables and a warm home-baked mini-loaf completed this dish.

d=3,3,1To finish, I enjoyed three cheeses from the range of six - St Eadburgha, a soft Cotswold brie; Stinking Bishop, the famous semi-soft cheese rind-washed in perry, and Alex James's (as I later learned) Little Wallop, a lovely runny goat's cheese wrapped in brandy-washed vine leaves. They came with quince and damson paste and Carr's water biscuits, so much nicer, I think, than all those healthy oat jobs in the eating of which I always feel like a horse.

Malteser ice cream, bramley apple and cinnamon doughnut, apricot and almond tart, and assorted ice creams were listed on the menu. Rosemarie went for the oozing chocolate fondant advertised on the blackboard - as I knew she would.