Stage

Older subscribers may recall the Taco Boys' horse-box on Porthilly beach. It was the jumping-off point for the collective that now runs Stage in Exeter's bosky Magdalen Road district, a 10-minute flit from the city centre. The place has been dolled up a little in the last few years, with comfier booth-style seating and the reception desk now moved sensibly to the door. Felix Craft and his team can be seen through a broad hatch at the back, while the effervescent Robbie Ashby runs the front with galvanising panache. The place takes about five minutes to fill up in the evening (book well ahead), and a sense of community prevails – we're all eating the same things, after all (give or take the odd allergy). It's four set courses at lunch, six at dinner, changing weekly. We began with a bowl of yummy beetroot gazpacho, accompanied by a steel brochette of beetroot, bresaola and quail's egg. Next up was a shatteringly good version of Chinese sticky chilli beef, made with battered and glazed shin, on an underlay of stir-fried spring greens, asparagus and slivered garlic – a stunning success. An intermediate salad saw more wafer-thin, rosy-red beef topped with Devon Blue cheese and rocket, before a majestic main course of crisped pollock with lemony fennel and wholewheat farfalle in a puddle of 'nudja fat, sizzling with chilli. A cheese course with lacto-fermented mini-plums and candied pistachios followed, while the whole show was rounded off with a slice of rhubarb frangipane tart, its accompanying milk espuma dotted with cornflakes. The drinks flight is worth taking: only three of the six items were wine when we visited, the rest were aromatic cocktails, shrubs and shandy. Not every match is, strictly speaking, a match, and the approach can teeter on the edge of recklessness, but it adds hugely to the fun. Which is exactly what Stage aims to deliver.