Finally, after five years of well-meant faffing, I reached The Dog & Gun Inn in Skelton, a Michelin-starred pub some seven miles northwest of Penrith. The fact that Cumbria now has the highest number of Michelin stars outside London is one of the weirder things I did not see happening in my lifetime, not least because many people couldn’t find its 6,769 square kilometres on a map of the UK and still confuse Cardiff with Carlisle.
There’s a huge irony in the fact that a chef such as Ben Queen-Fryer can take on a classic Cumberland country pub, similar to the many thousands around the country that thrived for years before sadly shutting, and whip it into such shape that Michelin came knocking, only for it then to be mostly overlooked in many Best of Cumbria lists because of the local competition. Crucially, though, the Dog & Gun is not at all like L’Enclume in Cartmel, Allium at Askham Hall, Forest Side at Grasmere or any of the Lakes’ other big beasts that serve ornate, multi-course fine dining to gastro-tourists. Rather, it is a charming, relatively unchanged, wholly unpretentious village pub that you might assume served only Cumberland sausage and mash and bags of Scampi Fries.
