Harrod serves a menu using locally produced meat and vegetables along with foraged ingredients such as charlock, hedge bedstraw and pennywort.

"[10] The signature of the restaurant is a suckling pig themed dish, incorporating a pork shoulder which is cooked over two days in a bain-marie, served with shallot and mugwort.

This is accompanied by a croquette made from pig's head and a pork cutlet with celeriac, pear, sorrel and cauliflower mushrooms.

[4] The restaurant serves breakfast to residents staying in the rooms, which includes Trealy Farm produced sausages and bacon.

[11] It remained in use as a small public house, until it was extensively refurbished and reopened as a high quality restaurant.For a number of years it was owned by the Jackson brothers.

John Jackson had previously been a sommelier at La Gavroche for around 6 years and presented the public face of the Crown, while his brother was chef.

[20] Harrod had previously worked under Raymond Blanc at two Michelin starred restaurant Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons.

[19] Victor Lewis-Smith reviewed the restaurant for The Guardian in 2005, thought that a spring onion risotto accompaniment to a pan fried seabass tasted so good that it would have been sufficient as a main course itself and was also quite pleased that crêpe suzette was served on a trolley for table side service.

It lies off a narrow lane winding between steepling, canopied hills in an odd corner between Monmouth and Chepstow.

In spite of its lost world location, the Crown has been a beacon of gastronomic adventure for at least 30 years – those with long memories will recall Stephen Bull carving out his reputation here.

In lesser hands, such a meal could be not so much a car crash as a multiple pile-up, but it is not, because the ingredients are handled with originality, assurance and, more importantly, a keen sense of pleasure.

"[26] Tony Naylor, writing for The Guardian in 2016, said that the menu featured unusual ingredients which complement each other resulting in "astonishing depths of flavour".

Some dishes he considered less successful; a broccoli amuse-bouche was likened to "a car veering on to a motorway’s rumble strips".