Pub food is improving all the time and the best establishments are highlighted in the recently released 2009 Michelin Guide to Eating Out in Pubs. The guide was launched on 3rd September, priced at £14.99, and is an invaluable guide to anyone looking for the best pub food around the country.

The guide reviews 563 pubs in the UK and Ireland, and this year’s edition contains 84 new entrants. Each year the guide selects one “Pub of the Year”, and this year’s winner is The Punch Bowl Inn, in Crosthwaite, Cumbria.

Each entry contains contact information, details of typical dishes, a list of the beers served and a price guide. It also highlights any features which make the pub outstanding and provides directions for finding the location. 110 pubs have been selected for special attention, and are awarded the “Inspectors Favourite” status. These entries are marked with the Bibendum stamp.

At the launch, Derek Bulmer, editor of the guide, commented on the ever-improving standard of pub food, “The standard of cooking in British and Irish pubs keeps getting better and better. We are seeing a growing confidence in our culinary heritage, greater use of local, seasonal ingredients and a rediscovery of regional specialties”.

The Punch Bowl Inn took the top spot this year because the guide’s inspectors were impressed by its classic cooking, its rustic charm, friendly ambience and, of course, its excellent selection of four real ales. The guide describes it as the perfect venue for unpretentious fine-dining.

A little-known feature of Michelin’s plant in Stoke-on-Trent is the company’s Black Museum, which Michelin refers to as “the home to the blackest collection of potentially deadly artifacts in the country”.

The museum is a salutary catalogue of the misuse of vehicle tyres. It contains 200 examples of potentially dangerous tyres. Michelin use the museum as part of its training programme for tyre safety. It is a service utilized by the police force, who use the exhibits to illustrate to Police Collision Investigators the way in which faulty tyres may contribute to accidents.

Richard Whitehurst, the Commercial Training Manager at the Black Museum explains: “We have around 200 car, van, bus, truck and motorbike tyres and tyre sections in our collection. They’re not all ours; it’s not a Michelin only collection. The point is that they have been damaged by a very wide variety of causes from under-inflation to mounting curbs to being slashed and just about anything else you can think of. We teach Police forces how to inspect a tyre, determine its condition and then identify what set of circumstances led to that condition. These are very highly trained professionals looking for subtle witness marks, scrapes, wear patterns and so on, to establish how a tyre has been used and to conclude how differently it might have performed with different treatment. It’s an invaluable skill to have when trying to find out exactly how an incident occurred. The tyre tells a story and it never lies.”