From Michelin stars to liver and bacon ...Richard McComb talks to Stephen Bull, a standard-bearer of modern British cooking, now plying his trade in rural Herefordshire.

Stephen Bull breaks off from pre-lunch duties in the kitchen at The Butchers Arms.

He is making bread and I ask if it is any good.

“I think it’s nice. Bread with black onion seeds, sesame seeds and dried apricots, all finely chopped up with rosemary and pumpkin and sunflower. Yeah, good bread. You’ll have to have some. It’s tasty stuff,” says Bull.

It sounds a bit different to the dry cob favoured by many pubs.

“Yeah, well, we try to be different, you know,” says Bull in the sort of deadpan voice favoured by members of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. Bull appears to be a thoroughly nice chap and he makes thoroughly nice food. He calls it classic pub food, in which case he may have invented a new genre of cuisine. It’s the sort of thing he does.

Together with chefs such as Rowley Leigh and Alistair Little, Bull is credited with being one of the leading exponents of modern British cooking, blazing a Michelin trail of glory through London before disappearing off the boutique gastronomy circuit and re-surfacing in the depths of rural Herefordshire.

When I suggest he likes making things hard for himself, and that it would have been far easier to open in London, where his name is still uttered in revered tones, Bull says he would be the first to agree. He’s got to fight for attention in the sparsely-populated, rolling hills to the east of Hereford, he insists. Hence the bread.

“We try to go the extra mile. You’ve got to where we are. We are stuck in the middle of nowhere and we’re in a recession as well. It’s hard going really,” says Bull.

He speaks candidly about the difficulties he has faced since taking on the Butchers Arms at Woolhope in June 2009.

“I wish I hadn’t opened this place actually,” says Bull. “We’ve had to endure two bad winters. Just after we opened, we had four months of road closures all round us which nearly put paid to us. New water mains were put in by Welsh Water and they progressively closed all the roads around us. Customers couldn’t get to us. It was hard, but we’re still here.”

Before The Butchers Arms, Bull successfully ran the Lough Pool at Sellack, Herefordshire, and expected loyal trade would automatically follow to his new place. “But that was then – and this is now. People look at their petrol bill when they fill their car up and they go, ‘Can we go out to The Butchers Arms? Hmm. Perhaps it is going to cost us 10 quid before we get there.’”

With his feted background, you might think Bull would be tempted to jazz up the local food scene with some snazzy restaurant touches, but he warns against the perils of taking the essential “pubiness” out of pubs.

Bull, whose other pub, the Hole in the Wall at Cambridge, has former MasterChef finalist Alex Rushmer as the new tenant, does an evening service comprising a small number of what he calls restaurant-type dishes. But there is always battered fish and chips and liver and bacon with onion rings on the menu.

Bull says: “We do faggots and ploughman’s at lunch time. We do pub standards really well. When we do a fish pie it’s a really good fish pie. We’ve got a pork and black pudding pie at the moment made with cream cheese pastry, which is a recipe from the Thomas Keller cookbook. He’s a top man. It comes over as a pubby pie, but it’s really good.”

Other pies include chicken with leeks and mushrooms, Longhorn beef, oxtail. “We do a mixture of pub classics and some slightly more elaborate dishes at dinner time. Frankly, I am not going to change. That is what I have always done in my pub life and it’s worked very well. It’s working well here. We are still finding our constituency because Herefordshire is not a very populous county and people need to have a good reason, particularly these days, to come here.”

Bull, who is now 67, came relatively late to cooking, working in the advertising industry until he was 26 (“I wish I’d stayed in it financially. I’d be far richer than I am now,” he says).