Keith Miller reviews Cambium, Hampshire: 'the servers reminded me of a Victoria Wood sketch'

[DeaGLe^]

I’ve always been fond of moss. It’s my Celtic blood, I suppose. It always seems so clean. In the First World War, they used it to dress wounds when they ran out of bandages.

As a child, trudging across the New Forest a few yards behind my binocular-toting father, I’d grab a wodge of it and revel in its softness and greenness, indifferent to the forest’s more obvious charms – the raw heathland, the brooding trees, the kestrels rollercoastering overhead, the incurious ponies, even an occasional deer, shocked into stillness – to the exasperation of the old man. I suspect I had to be discouraged from sucking it. There’s not much point doing that unless you’re Bear Grylls.

So when I saw the enormous mossy log that serves as a centrepiece to the dining room at Cambium, it triggered powerful memories and ancient imaginings – of Seventies Hampshire, and the last days of the druids, and absent friends.

Brockenhurst is a big village in the forest, around which upscale faux-rustic hotels cluster. Cambium is one of a number of restaurants attached to Carey’s Manor, a spa of the sort James Bond would be sent to for a spot of R&R, only to discover that the swarthy stranger in the sauna wasn’t a loss adjuster from Bournemouth, but a dastardly agent of SMERSH with a warhead in his biro. 

The menus at Cambium looked promising: fancy but not fancy-schmancy; conscientious about provenance (there’s a menu that they claim is entirely sourced from within the forest boundaries); traditional with the odd modern touch.