The Wye Knot Restaurant, The Back Riverbank, Chepstow.

PRIZEWINNING restaurants have a reputation to maintain, an onerous duty more fraught than running an establishment which produces good food but has yet to collect any awards for it.

The Wye Knot carries its responsibilities well. It's as though high standards have always been the norm and that picking up the Gwent Restaurant of the Year title was a mere but welcome bonus.

It certainly eschews the pomp and ceremony cultivated by some over-rated restaurants with prices to match.

Tucked away at the bottom of Chepstow just yards from the Wye's ebb and flow, it has a small ante-room where diners sip aperitifs and survey what a friend calls "the blackboards of delight".

Three of us went along to cut a bigger swathe through what was on offer - two blackboards, one with an a la carte list and the other with a two-course and three-course fixed-price menu at £11.95 and £14.95 respectively.

The management graciously allowed one of us to pinch something from the set menu and include it in the main one.

We had two starters - king prawns deep fried in batter, with sweet chilli sauce and creme fraiche, and an assiette of smoked and marinated fish with creme fraiche, apple and horseradish.

The three main courses were pork fillet and black pudding with bubble-and-squeak and cider vinegar sauce; chicken supreme stuffed with light tarragon mouse, oyster mushrooms and asparagus with sherry cream sauce; and lamb with mint cous-cous and tarragon jus.

And for dessert, grapefruit and orange segments in fruit jelly; pancakes in suzette sauce and vanilla ice cream; and cold rice pudding with cherry fruit compote and amaretto sabayon.

We had drinks before the meal and two bottles of a velvety Chilean cabernet sauvignon (£15 each but we decided to go for it).

With coffee, the bill - for three, remember - came to £100 exactly.

Reservations: 01291 622929.

Nigel Jarrett