Dave Wiles savours an excellent supper

A framed receipt, dated 1907, hanging on the restaurant wall of the White Swan in Pickering, shows a charge of £1 17s 6d for no less than 15 dinners. How times change.

A three-course meal for the two of us - with no wine - came to a steep £62, plus the tip. But you get what you pay for, and we certainly got our money's worth.

This 16th century hotel and restaurant, which has in its time been the haunt of Whitby smugglers, the town's court house and an officers' mess, has been highly-decorated for its accommodation. It was voted Hotel of the Year by the Yorkshire Tourist Board this year, but its website - with the highly-coveted address www.white-swan.co.uk - says the ultimate goal is to be voted Britain's best inn.

Judging by the standard of food and service we enjoyed, they are in with a good shout.

On arrival on a balmy Saturday night, we were shepherded into the small bar, offered a drink and handed the menu. This was perhaps the low point of the whole experience: choosing.

The menu, which is changed weekly, is impressive, and several of the dishes shouted out to me immediately. Fortunately, my partner Karin and I have similar tastes so we were able to pick and mix from each other's plates.

Because the restaurant proper was fully-booked, we were seated in the snug, a cosy room overlooking Pickering's Market Place. A feeling of quality about the place was enhanced by the starched white tablecloths and napkins, and silver candlesticks. And it was smoke-free.

After much deliberation, I chose seared king scallops, gratinated with Coverdale, parsley and dry-cured bacon (£8.95). Like everything that followed, it was exquisitely presented and fantastically flavoursome. Head chef Darren Clemmit seems to like adding bacon to dishes - this was one of three on the menu - and it worked very well.

Karin selected smoked wild Dornoch salmon with lemon and fresh herb salad (£6.25), which was beautifully textured and delicately flavoured.

Having nearly come to blows over our choice of main course - we both wanted the same things - I had finally gone for chargrilled beef fillet with roast beetroot and local watercress salad, sauted potatoes and herb pesto (£16.50). The varied flavours on the plate were balanced perfectly and the beef was done to a T. Unbeatable, except perhaps by Karin's dish - the bacon and thyme-roasted chicken breast, with crepe stuffing and warm salad of globe artichokes and tomatoes (£13.25), which I had fancied. It was faultless.

As a side dish, we shared a plate of runner beans with crisp bacon and garlic butter (£2).

The blurb on the website says the theory behind the fare at the White Swan is "creative... without being pretentious", and this seems a fair representation of their offerings. And if you can stretch to a bottle of wine, the cellar has selections going back to 1934 clarets and is, to say the least, expansive.

Our budget for this meal was by this point just about exhausted, but we could not bring ourselves to leave without diving in to the delights of the dessert selection. I had a delicious poached peach melba with raspberry ripple ice cream and toasted almonds (£4.80), which tasted as good as it sounds.

Karin chose rich chocolate cake with clotted cream and macerated cherries and did her normal trick of asking for a change to the advertised dish, just to test the flexibility of the kitchen and waiting-on staff.

And they slipped up. She ordered with the black treacle ice cream, rather than clotted cream, which didn't happen, but the mistake was quickly corrected. No harm was done, and the dessert still got an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

At regular intervals during our 90-minute stay, people walked in off the street in a vain search for a table. If you are tempted to visit the White Swan for dinner, book well in advance. We rang at noon on the day, inquiring after a table, and were lucky to get one of the few that remained. It was with a mixture of pity and smug satisfaction that we listened to would-be diners being politely turned away as we basked in the warm glow of a first-class meal.

FACT FILE

Food: outstanding

Service: courteous

Value: expensive

Ambience: relaxed

Disabled access: No

White Swan, Market Place, Pickering, tel: 01751 472288.