Swanage is a town torn from a picture book on the Isle of Purbeck: loveliness and vulgarity both. It is famous for fossils, Purbeck marble, a dangerous-looking small theme park, and Punch and Judy. My husband is very attached to Swanage, because it exists in a state of 1952 – in homage to this, it has a branch line with a station from The Railway Children. In the summer, on the beach, you see fat sunburnt people with handkerchiefs on their heads. I didn’t think they existed anymore: I thought they were all dead.

Some parts of Dorset have gentrified, though this doesn’t really describe what has happened to Sand-banks, the Bishop’s Avenue of the coast. That is closer to calamity, or invasion by space aliens who love concrete and glass. I can’t bear to look at Sandbanks, so I can’t say if it has good restaurants.

This is generous food. The rib-eye is as good as can be found

Lulworth Cove is as eerie as ever: you will get pub food here, near necrotic fairy cottages (all holiday lettings now, of course). Lyme cannot surpass its close-up in Persuasion, and then The French Lieutenant’s Woman: that is, I’d rather visit those Lymes than my own. But since I make an annual pilgrimage to Swanage, I want to know if fine food is possible here, and it is, due to James Warren, the owner of the Salt Pig.

Restaurateurs are optimists. It’s rare they hate people and, when they do, they get a sitcom: Fawlty Towers. The Salt Pig is a series of five restaurants (with deli and butchery) in the Purbeck Hills: at Wareham, Studland, Tyneham, Carey’s Secret Garden near Worgret – Dorset place names are special – and Swanage. Warren keeps rare Mangalitsa x Berkshire pigs and, because he is tender to them, they travel no more than eight miles to be eaten. Or you can order a box of them.

The Salt Pig in Swanage (Salt Pig Too) is on the main drag, surrounded by the shops of 1952, and warm and vivid: orange paint; wood floors and walls, like a ship; wild art, because it is also an art gallery dedicated to food, or pre-food. There are paintings of cows; of 2kg of Roscoff shallots for £12, which I doubt had a close-up until now; of flowers, piglets, and pigs; of a rabbit that looks disturbed even for a rabbit; a still life of salad. It’s an attempt to fix a farm inside a frame, though it can’t be done, if done well. They tumble out and all around.

At Sunday lunchtime the menu is a glut. Names of cuts are scratched onto a blackboard: Asian pork belly; rib-eye steak; peri peri chicken legs; lamb chops; a singular trout. They come with side dishes – corn on the cob, new potatoes with herbs, a dressed salad – for £16.95. Or you choose from a hot buffet at the entrance, which is another glut: Med-iterranean vegetables and coastal cheddar cheese; a steak and bacon sausage roll; coastal cheddar mac and cheese; lasagna; lamb and mint pie.

This is generous food. The rib-eye is as good as can be found, and guiltlessly bloody, with charred and buttery sweetcorn. The salads – bean, beetroot, potato, tomato, olive and cabbage – could be continental European salads, and I know no higher praise, particularly near pigs. The chicken is as lively as it can be, being dead.

All this amounts to The Salt Pig being a small bespoke Harvester that cares about food, or the house of a farmer’s wife who woke up startled and, in some magical trance, cooked all the animals on the farm, and I can think of nothing more delightful.