Long Compton is in the Cotswolds, but to the east, where there are no boutique hotels or shops selling artisan candles to tourists. Banburyshire and its surrounds are actual countryside. Fields roll away in the manner Germans call Kulturlandschaft , meaning landscape shaped by centuries of human care. This is the sort of country that makes people write poetry about hedgerows and choral music about sheep: lovely to live in but, by long British tradition, a dismal place to dine out. Discovering a truly great restaurant in Long Compton – population 764 – feels like finding in rural Warwickshire one of those bucolic la France profonde dining experiences that seemed nostalgic fantasies even when M.F.K Fisher described them.

Yet this is where Oxheart, which seats 11 people across two small

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