Deadlines dictate visiting the Talbot Inn on opening night. Not ideal, and worse, it is Valentine's Day. I beg local friends to come for dinner, insurance against sitting with couples in sepulchral silence.
The Talbot's new proprietors did up Wiltshire's much publicised Beckford Arms in 2011. To that box-office hit, a Somerset sequel.
Mells is an indecently pretty estate village, home to the Asquith family, with a 15th-century church where Siegfried Sassoon is buried.
So much for canoodling couples – the village burghers have mobbed the place. I elbow my way to the bar with practised ease and check in. Eight rooms in all and I can see through open doors that some are quite vast, with baths before big sash windows, and some (costing a reasonable £95) quite small. Mine is spacious at a middling £110.
White, modern four-poster bed, pale walls, de rigueur tweed chair, and tiled bathroom are quietly tasteful, as if to say, "this is a pub, the action's downstairs". The TV does whizzy things like streaming DVDs, and I heart the art, but the bathroom lacks a shelf, and coffee things sit on a very low, three-legged table – so low it might have come out of a primary classroom. Dusting off my knees, I go in search of my pals.
The inn, arranged around a cobbled stableyard, is a warren of snug rooms to eat in and imbibe Long Ashton cider, but the rear coach house is the piece de resistance. Within, a second bar and four long, polished tables which lie in wait before a giant indoor grill which isn't ready for firing up tonight, more's the pity. Wagamama meets olde English temple to meat. If only Hogarth were still around.
We don't do too badly, squeezed into a pub room, the lighting just right, over Fleurie and house red, at £27 and £17 respectively.
Fish chowder "tickles the spot" with shell-on mussels and cockles, says G, adding that at £7 it's "better value" than the fortune he's just spent at Scott's in Mayfair. A main of salt beef hash with duck egg and slivers of gherkin is like a New York Sunday. D's veggie main gets marks for not being risotto or wild mushrooms but G's medium burger is what we call well done.
The general manager, I tell them, has come from Babington House and will presumably pull up pub service by its bootstraps. "Somerset, for all that it is beautiful, doesn't excel at that," observes D.
"Ten feet away from the dining table – rather nice," G says later, when they nip up to check out my room. The white bed is sheer delight. Best this year. Then again, it is only February. I could whinge a little about breakfast: noisy DIY juicer, coffee cups for tea. But the bigger picture is this: the Talbot is a new generation inn and how publicans reinvent to remain at the heart of village life is exciting right now. We know what happens to dinosaurs.
• Accommodation provided by the Talbot Inn
