While London restaurants struggle, the north is steaming ahead

I’m hearing a lot of conversations at the moment about a flourishing of quality restaurants in the north of England. I know. This is reductive and patronising and, as always happens when I mention reviewing a “northern” restaurant, the comments section will light up with angry accusations ranging from metropolitan bias to general southern softness. But hear me out. The pandemic, lockdowns and furlough have forced everybody in the industry into brutal self-analysis and some problems have surfaced.

The relationship between the hospitality and property sectors is, it seems, dangerously close, toxic and co-dependent. Even before the pandemic, questions were being asked about the sustainability of absurd rents. Lockdown, a moratorium on repossession and furlough, have just kept everyone in an uneasy holding pattern. Attracting good staff and maintaining their quality of life wasn’t much talked about before. Now we talk of little else and then, of course, there’s the awkward business of people leaving big cities and rather enjoying working from home.

In short, previously comfortable southern restaurateurs — with suitable premises now rare and expensive, staff impossible to find and customers, well . . . absent — can’t help but look to the north and mutter resentfully under their breath: “Look at them. Gorgeous country, packed with beautiful buildings you can probably rent for a tenner. Plentiful, happy staff. And half our bloody customers have moved here.” 

OK. I exaggerate, but not much. Truth is, “The North”, however you define it, is steaming out of the pandemic with speed and vigour. And so I find myself back on the A1. The lovely village of Hayfield is but a short hike east from Manchester, but I’m coming in on a broad loop south of Doncaster and west through the Peak District National Park.

“Countryside” makes me break out in hives but this is, I’m forced to admit, the most inspiring landscape, and Hayfield is the last bit of metalled road before you’re forced to don a cagoule and ascend Kinder Scout, armed with a corned beef sandwich and a rousing chorus of The Internationale. The Pack Horse is precisely the pub you’d expect to find here, with the very slight difference that their kitchen is lauded as one of the best for hundreds of miles.

We’ll start with a salad of white Whitby crab, watercress, radish and blood orange, served in a mound on a piece of sourdough toast, screeded 4mm thick with brown crab meat. We could go technical here and say that if you pile your salad on toast, you’re looking at an open-face sandwich or possibly a tartine, and then have to accept that they’re using brown crabmeat like butter . . . and that is the most magnificent coup in sandwich serving in all my long and fevered recollection. I can barely express how it delights me that young chefs have rediscovered brown crabmeat and are trowelling it hither and yon. Other nations have to devise sauces, create character through fermentation and ageing. We just haul this gunge out of a crab and spread it on bread, and it smells of the dark and ancient mysteries of the deep, like something scraped from the crevices of Janai’ngo, the Amorphous Marine Horror who serves Cthulhu. This is some profound stuff and no mistake.

Continuing the aquatic theme, a tranche of turbot, grilled on the bone and served with Dorset clam and leek butter sauce. Turbot can be challenging. I don’t mean they come armed or remonstrate when cooked. More that, with the slightest overdoing, their meat becomes like dry chicken. It takes a steady character on the grill, efficient service to get it to the table at its peak, and a sauce that clings, coats and varnishes everything it touches. Leeks sweated into cream will always be a good start, but threatening clams till they leak their rich fluids completes a fish-cream balm suitable for anointing minor gods or mythic heroes.

There were leeks mornay too, a rare side dish these days. Perhaps a little dowdy, out-of-date and stolid for fashionable venues, but at the Pack Horse it’s a celebration. Strong leeks. Big muscly bastards that remind you they are stinking British alliums that need to be torn up from the earth by strong-armed miners, not flaccid biomass to be foraged and ikebana’ed by some tweezer-botherer with a wicker basket and an amusing hat. The cheese in the sauce was assertive, a complete meal for a lesser man.

I was as troubled by the dessert as I was drawn to it. Truffled Baron Bigod is undoubtedly one of the finest cheeses in the isles at the moment. It’s a washed-rind number, made in Suffolk in the manner of a Brie de Meaux. But, when properly affined, smoother, and somehow richer, it sits easily as dessert. I just couldn’t work out whether serving it with treacle and walnut malt loaf and pickled onions wasn’t some sort of elaborate Northern joke they wheeled out for anyone turning up on a broad loop south of Doncaster in a London-registered four-wheel drive.

In fact, it was utterly superb. The malt loaf was savoury (it’s easy to forget that treacle, a by-product of sugar refining, can be more complex, bitter and smokey than sweet), the cheese was smooth and sticky and the onions, pickled in balsamic vinegar and sliced finely, brought the sweetness. It was clever, witty and executed beautifully. We bandy the term “signature dish” too much and it’s rarely deserved, but if these guys invented this one, they should be proud to carve their names on it.

It was one of the happiest, most relaxed dinners I’ve eaten in a long time, in a place of genuinely breathtaking splendour. I drove home the same evening, seven saddle-sore hours of round trip giving a man too much time to think. And for their malty bread, I’ll forgive them any trespasses.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at tim.hayward@ft.com

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