enter the restaurant there is a lovely whiff of wood smoke from the open fire, and your eye takes in the comfortable dimensions of the unfussy, low-ceilinged rooms, with their exposed wooden beams, cream painted walls and wooden floors. It has brightness and warmth.

The restaurant is quite busy at lunch time, and obviously popular with people from the business and science parks, but the staff were helpful and chatty, and we didn't feel at all rushed. The menus have three distinct aspects - of which the sausages may be the best known. There is a choice of four sausages (including venison and also pork, sage and chestnut) which you then combine with your choice of four sauces and four styles of mash. This is the basis of a splendid winter lunch. Then there is the fish menu, with its siren call of crab and crayfish tian with sweet red pepper dressing, or the sea bass fillets with lemongrass sauce. But to make your choice more difficult there is also the main menu, which combines deep comfort (steak and mushroom pie on this particular day, or roast pork belly) and a touch more adventure (haloumi, red chard, rocket and pine nut salad, or goat's cheese and aubergine cannelloni). So, all in all, it took some time to choose our lunch. (And as it was lunchtime, we really appreciated seeing that there was a range of 14 wines available by the glass, as were three ports and four pudding wines. It is so infuriating when there is only 'house red' or 'house white' by the glass.)

Our actual choices were pork terrine with fruit compote and a salad which included rocket and frisee. Pork lends itself to sweetness, so the neat little discs of coarse pork, studded with dried fruit, worked well. For the mains we settled for pork sausages with the most excellent onion sauce, which contained long', slender skeins of caramelized onion, together with colcannon mash. Very satisfying. The home-made burger, coarse-cut and chunky, had a most intriguing lift to the taste - we knew it, but couldn't quite put our fingers on it. Finally we had to ask the waitress to ask the chef. The answer came back - it was just a touch of Five Spice powder. Of course.

Pudding pretty well chose itself - sticky toffee pudding, (served with vanilla ice cream) which lived up to all expectations. Later on, chatting to the staff, we learned that it is a fixture on a menu which changes seasonally, weekly and, for things like pie or soup, daily. Sticky toffee pudding had been removed from the menu during the summer, but had to be almost instantly re-instated, because of popular demand. The kitchen obviously enjoy trying different things out, and as ice cream lovers, we were quite miffed to hear about some of the more unusual things they have made - the After Eight ice cream, the tiramisu ice and the sorbets - including mango and an Earl Grey tea sorbet - which happened not to be available on our visit.

The Crown and Punchbowl tries to source as much as possible locally, and is obviously proud of having so many gluten-free dishes - including a sausage which is gluten-free. We happened not to have any dietary requirements, but found some of the vegetarian options were rather tempting. Worth knowing, as it all helps to increase the choices about where to go with a big group of friends.