The Cyder House Inn

The Cyder House Inn sits in Shackleford, a village just outside Godalming, and it is a country pub in the plainest sense of the term. Not a pub that has been converted into something else, and not a restaurant wearing a pub's clothes. The food is described as British country cooking, home-cooked, and the place trades on the things country pubs trade on: a garden in summer, a fire in winter, and a kitchen that keeps to the season.

The ££ price band tells you what to expect and what not to. This is not a special-occasion tasting menu, and it is not the cheapest meal you will find near Godalming either. It is the middle: a proper sit-down dinner where two people can eat and drink without treating it as an event, but where you would still think about it before doing it twice in a week. For most readers that puts it in the category of a good Saturday lunch, a birthday that does not need fuss, or the meal you book when someone has come down from London and wants to see some countryside attached to their dinner.

Shackleford is genuinely rural, which matters practically. You are heading out of Godalming into lanes, and that shapes how you plan the evening. Somebody is driving, or you are sorting a taxi in advance rather than assuming one will appear. It also means the setting does a lot of the work, the appeal here is partly that you have gone somewhere, rather than walked five minutes from the high street.

Who it suits: couples and small groups who want a long, unhurried meal; families at the weekend, particularly if the garden is in play; walkers who have spent a morning out in the Surrey Hills and want feeding properly afterwards. Less obviously a business lunch venue, simply because of the distance from anywhere you would be working.

Before booking, two things. First, seasonal cooking means the menu moves, so if you are travelling for something in particular, ring and ask rather than assuming. Second, a pub of this kind in a village this small can fill on a sunny weekend and on the dark evenings when the fire is the draw, book, don't chance it.

Godalming itself has a decent spread of places to eat, and the town centre is where you go for convenience. The Cyder House is the other option: the one you choose when the point is the drive out, the setting, and a kitchen doing straightforward British food well. That is an honest position for a country pub to hold, and it is the reason people make the trip rather than staying in town.