Quod Restaurant & Bar
A light-filled room in the Old Bank Hotel on Oxford's High Street, where coffee becomes a long lunch.
A light-filled room in the Old Bank Hotel on Oxford's High Street, where coffee becomes a long lunch.
Quod sits on the ground floor of the Old Bank Hotel at 92-94 High Street, and the building tells its own story before the food arrives. This was a bank once, and the room has kept that sense of scale: high ceilings, tall windows, a generous span that most Oxford restaurants simply do not have. Fill it with midday chatter and light bouncing off the glass and you have one of the more characterful rooms in the city centre. From the windows you look straight out at the parade of cyclists, gowns and visitors that makes the High what it is.
The kitchen keeps things European and unfussy. The blackboard specials change with the season, and around them sits a familiar spread of brasserie cooking that is done properly rather than reinvented. We come for lunch more often than dinner. The weekday set lunch is the sensible move, the pace is easier in daylight, and the room is at its best when the sun is coming through those windows. In summer the Italian garden terrace is the seat to angle for, and on a Sunday the roast draws a steady crowd. It is not the most experimental cooking in Oxford, but that has never been the point of Quod. The point is a well-run room, a cold glass of something and a table you are in no hurry to leave.
Quod earns its keep as the anchor of a day out rather than a destination on its own. It sits a couple of minutes from the heart of the university, so we build the visit around it. A morning at the Ashmolean Museum or the wonderfully cluttered Pitt Rivers Museum sets you up for a table here at one o'clock, and the colleges, the covered market and the bookshops are all a short walk in either direction afterwards. If you would rather read the city up properly before you go, our guide to Oxford lays out where to start.
From the cottage it is roughly a 35 to 40 minute drive into the centre, around fifteen miles down through Woodstock. Central Oxford is not a place to bring a car if you can help it, so we tend to use the Westgate car park or one of the park-and-rides on the ring road and walk in from there. Booking is worth doing, especially at weekends and for the terrace. If Quod is full, or you want a change of scene, The Bear Inn is a tiny, ancient pub a few streets away for a pint and a plate rather than a full lunch.
“Lunchtime Quod is one of those Oxford rituals that just works. Big room, simple food, a glass of white, and nowhere you need to be afterwards.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.