Being lucky enough to have a car, occasional spare cash and a like-minded boyfriend, I often get to explore the wilds of Oxfordshire for exciting places to eat. Each trip is begun with some ritual agonising over whether to risk a bad dinner in the name of exploration or to return to an old favourite where we know we’ll eat well.

Once we have agreed that we should try somewhere new, I refer to my mental list of possible places. Suggestions from friends, random sightings while en-route elsewhere and frequent searches online constantly feed my internal dining database. Anything up to an hour away is fair game. Debate ensues, with reference to websites where available, and once the arguments die down, phone reservations sometimes follow.

Then it’s into the car, on with the sat-nav (a recent addition that aside from her love of tiny back roads has proved invaluable), and away to see what we can find.

The restaurants, pubs and cafes covered in the following “Escaping from Oxford to Eat Out” series of posts, are all ones I’m happy to recommend. We have eaten at numerous other places, ranging from the mediocre to the erratic, but I like all these eateries, and I hope you will too.