Discover
Our Story
About us & brief history of the Cross Keys, Pulloxhill
The Family
Our lovely country pub and restaurant is situated in the heart of Bedfordshire with a large garden and paddock, where you will also find our lovely paddock marquee perfect for hosting life’s events or private events.
We as a family have been running The Cross Keys for over 55 years. When Peter and Sheila Meads took over the running of The Cross Keys in November 1970 they greatly expanded the food service and built our great reputation for great value home-made and locally sourced dishes. Peter and Sheila (with their mutual love of Jazz music) began hosting jazz musicians in 1971, and there is still to this day free Live Jazz every Sunday open to everyone.
Paul took over the running of the business in 2014 as Peter and Sheila finally took to enjoying their retirement! Paul has continued to provide great food at great prices whilst supporting other small local businesses in the area by purchasing our raw ingredients from local providers, and using other local businesses for many services.
As many of you may have seen in the past few years – we’ve been updating the menu and presentation of the food we serve, to bring a new modern twist to our menus. So far we’ve had great feedback especially with Sunday Lunches getting great reviews for the amazing roasted (local) vegetables and delicious herb roasted potatoes. Our kitchen team have introduced several new dishes and our great kitchen team are always open to any suggestions you might have if there is something you’d like to see on the menu!
Outside is where the most obvious changes have occurred with a new outside garden area and a new layout makes for easy access to the pub – we even had to divert our access road in the process!
Inside we’ve repainted all the areas, and made a lot of small changes, introducing subtle back ground music for instance, comfy new chairs, free Wi-Fi and generally making it even more enticing and relaxing place to be. We want people to come and enjoy their time here with us and feel they are getting great value.
Paul is still hugely involved (like his father Peter) in giving up his free time and services for the local community and charities. As you may have seen from our facebook page, it gives us great pleasure to help raise through the Cross Keys literally thousands and thousands of pounds each year for local charities such Ampthill Round Table – (an amazing organization) where you can see actual tangible results in and around the area. Here at the The Cross Keys we believe helping the local community is vital, and to this end we also raises money for the village directly, such as the beautiful St James church and Pulloxhill and Greenfield schools, all of which would not be possible if it wasn’t also for our fantastically generous customers, and our amazing staff who also give up a lot of their free time also.
About our Team
We’re incredibly lucky to have a fantastic team here at the Cross Keys, as mentioned many of our staff give up their free time to help the local community and raise funds for charities, especially Kat who works extremely hard in the background helping, organising and supporting both the day to day business and the many charity events we have here.
In the kitchen our head Chef Darren is always putting care and thought in the dishes we serve and constantly fine-tune our menu so our customers have a great meal to remember.
Front of house is managed by a great team made of Gemma, Kayleigh and Becky who make sure everything runs smoothly along with our third generation Harry Meads!
