‘A supreme inn for all seasons’: The Roebuck, Mobberley, reviewed

I can’t quite remember the first time I went to The Roebuck.

It might have been in 2018, when my brother picked me up from my mate’s flat in Burnage late one winter morning, en route to eat with the family.

“You look like you’ve slept in a bin,” he said as I clambered into the passenger seat on three hours kip. “Are you hungry?”

In fact it may have been a year earlier, when I was dogsitting nearby and went in search of an afternoon pint with a pug-cross, a terrier and a diabetic spaniel in tow. 

Time is something of a flat circle in this neck of the woods, whereas if you walk around Manchester city centre regularly enough you can almost feel the tectonic plates of the food scene shifting under your feet. 

Pick a time five years ago, five months ago or five years from now, and chances are I’ll be planning to pay a visit to The Roebuck sometime soon.

Slope off the main road to Knutsford, into a little hamlet of cottages and it appears, a place pleasantly and seductively outside of time, sat like a set from a Samuel Beckett play that someone forgot to dismantle. It’s got the look of a bolthole for the French Resistance, cosy and conspiratorial with a warm amber light from the candlelit tables. Inside, even more so. 

It’s difficult to create this sort of decor without it seeming affected, a cosplay in wax-drenched bottles, glass cabinets filled with spritzer dispensers and Ella Fitzgerald oozing from somewhere in the back room. The Roebuck has all of this but wears it with a shabby glamour, like a rumpled Savile Row suit being picked up off the floor and pulled on every day. What, this old thing?

There’s not really a bad seat in the house, each table with its own snug sense of space and a candle in the centre, domed pendant lights dangling and enough surrounding bric-a-bric to fill thirty charity shops. 

But all of this would be meaningless without a good menu, which fortunately The Roebuck has. There’s a Sunday lunch offering, of course, but really the place is a bistro. A bit of this, a bit of that and some of the other. That and wine.

On this occasion I was enjoying a pre-Christmas long and lazy lunch with my sister and the nephew, in that part of the year where if time isn’t constantly snapping at your heels it seems to dissolve altogether. The afternoon is taken care of, all you need to figure out is what to eat. 

Fortunately this decision was in part already made. My regular craving to come here always hinges on the same starter; French onion soup (£7). This can be one of the most monumentally disappointing things to order from a restaurant, I find. Too watery, too gloopy, too much, not enough, cheap on the Gruyère, lacking in brandy or utterly pissed on the stuff - there’s plenty of ways to throw off the alchemy of this certified classic. 

The Roebuck delivers it with unerring quality. The broth, magma-hot and sealed beneath a layer of Gruyère croutons, has the depth and web of complex notes that only hours steeping on the hob can provide. I think of the poor chef de partie who chops all those onions every morning in a welder’s mask. That hardy root veg can shoulder an awful lot of added flavours, and here it holds up a generous weight of brandy and stock. A beautiful concoction and something I think about maybe more than is healthy.

My sister had the same and followed it sensibly with something else from the small plates section, grilled lamb skewers with fresh mint yoghurt, harissa and dukkah (£8.50). These are a good exercise in combining flavours that get on well; fatty and well-seasoned lamb, warming and earthy dukkah and harissa, and a cooling yoghurt. No twists and turns, just a well balanced plate that can easily be added to should you wish.

I was not so sensible, and instead veered wildly onto the main plates section, landing on the pan fried chicken schnitzel with gruyere aligot mashed potato, tenderstem and a heritage tomato and basil sauce (£17.50). Yes, more gruyere. 

The schnitzel was perfectly coated and seasoned, crunchy and still succulent, and if anything could have been a bit thinner, if only to save me from a total physical collapse. The mash was approached in that very French way where it’s effectively fifty percent butter and, being an aligot, imbued with enough cheese to set your arteries shuddering in terror. It was a wonderful main, and I made my way through most of it, I just slightly overfaced myself. “No matter, as long as you enjoyed it,” said the server. I did indeed.

Wine was a bottle of the Alo Jais Noir (£28.50), a Carignan grape from the Côtes Catalanes and an example of The Roebuck’s approach to their wine menu; if you know what you like it’s probably in there, but it’s also peppered with more unusual bottles that they seem to make a point of sourcing. There’s also the bottle store in the back room should you be after something to take home. The nephew was more interested in the water bowl for the dogs that slump about the place.

All that remained was dessert, and while the options were all enticing in their own way - chocolate delice (£7), crème brûlée (£6.50), crumble (£6.50) - there could be only one, the homemade honeycomb Paris Brest with glazed raspberries and salted caramel sauce (£7).

We shared it, and it’s the perfect dessert for sharing I would say. Eat a whole one to yourself and you need sectioning, but with a spoon each you just roughly slice and scoop away at it in a way that’s incredibly pleasant. The choux pastry is close to that of an eclair, intimidating-looking but unnervingly light, allowing for a filling of cream that again doesn’t flatten you to the back of your chair. It looks beautiful and tastes magnificent.

It doesn’t seem to matter how many visits I pay to The Roebuck, the time of day or even the season, it remains enchantingly ageless, hovering in wait until you next turn up with an appetite. The ghosts of diabetic spaniels and foolishly late nights stalk its nooks and corners, time does another lap around the flat circle and I order the French onion soup.

The Roebuck Inn, Mill Lane, Mobberley, Knutsford, Cheshire, WA16 7HX