This is a real find. Taken here by friends and wasnt sure what to expect. When I found out it was under an old gym in the basement of an old canal side mill was even more dubious.
I was wrong, very wrong. Greeted by the host, who's name I didn't get (my fault), who immediately put you at ease and obviously enjoyed chatting with his customers.
The dining area is simple, I've read reviews that complain about the decor, it's a mill basement, steel beams bare walls, air con ducts. Some places pay designers a fortune to make it look like this.
And then the food. Mine host brought us an espresso cup of the best tasting mushroom soup. "Sumat a bit tasty".
Starters and main courses were ordered, one vegy, two fish and mine black pudding and bacon salad, I dont like sharing.
Mains. Two fish, one vegy and mine three versions of hogget, (look it up). Every dish was excellent, better than some high end restaurants. Then cheese and three puddings. Awesome.
It's a family run place and Paul the chef is a fantastic cook, (he's worked at several Michelin Starred places, his father in law brags) and it's a justified brag.
Please try it and if you dont believe me, read Giles Coren's review;
"There was one other couple in there (brave to open for lunch on a Tuesday in February, not many small local indies outside London do that) and good 1980s music playing and I felt comfy and well looked after in the corner with my view of the canal and pops-in-law for company.
“This is what is technically known as an amuse-bouche,” he said, laying two deep-fried battered mushrooms with a swirl of wettish duxelle before me. “But up here we call it ‘summat tasty’.”
I have no idea how he had rumbled that I wasn’t from these parts, but the mushrooms were delicious, thank you very much.
The winter menu was exceptionally well balanced: five starters of which three were vegetarian with one fish and one poultry, and five mains featuring one veggie, two fish and two meat, plus the offer of more vegetarian and vegan options on request.
I had a couple of starters, a lovely rare pigeon breast (£7.50), full of gamey flavour, with a good crispy, spicy pigeon samosa (the chef might consider dusting it with icing sugar and calling it a pastilla for added poshness – although maybe the Indian reference is more relevant for Bradford) with cavolo nero and blobs of mushroom ketchup (the same stuff that I poncily called “duxelle” a few sentences ago – I’ll have to get over meself), and also the bubble and squeak cake (£6), which was chunky and fresh tasting with some carrot for sweetness and colour and a perfectly done duck yolk on top with just a circle of the white left round it, with winter chanterelles and a white bean puree, all presented really, really prettily.
For my main, I had cute, rare, sweet noisettes of butter-poached local venison loin (£18) with a sweet carrot puree and red wine sauce that came with a shepherd’s pie of braised leg (or possibly shoulder) meat. Not a little pie of the kind you used to get from the likes of Gary Rhodes alongside your posh meat in the 1990s, but a proper big old bubbling shepherd’s pie in an iron skillet that you could feed a family with.
Now, normally I don’t do pudding. But I just had the sense I’d have been missing out. So I had the Bakewell tart made to Paul’s gran’s recipe, which was warm and rich with terrific pastry, sitting on zigzags of redcurrant coulis with a pink sphere of ice cream on the top. A picture, it was.
And then I had the rhubarb cheesecake (£6.50). You can’t come all this way and not have the early forced (as I did in York a couple of weeks ago). Paul had poached it and laid it over a really first-rate, cheesy rhubarb cheesecake, with some cubes of rhubarb jelly, blobs of custard … Magnificent. And a very good espresso, too.
This place has not just charm but a real touch of class. Good local ingredients, modern ideas, regional twists, the odd gentle joke (rhubarb and custard), first-class presentation, incredibly friendly service."
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