Some new ground for two of Leeds’ existing and best-known independents, Sarto is a restaurant collaboration between the people behind The Brunswick on North Street, up past The Reliance, and the frankly awesome Laynes Espresso just outside the station.

It focuses squarely on pasta, and was born out of a series of test pop-up events that clearly showed the demand. Sarto serves a decent variety of fresh pasta dishes at pretty good prices in a space in Munro House, close to Leeds College of Music and the BBC.

The food is excellent. Fresh pasta, cooked well, with care and attention. Big bowls of rigatoni dressed sparsely with slow cooked shoulder of lamb and mint, fettuccine with wild mushrooms and cream, spike with marsala, big bowls of sourdough bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar … you get the idea.

Bread is important.

It’s the most fundamental of foods, loaded with symbolism, heavy with tradition, commanding its own rituals and reverence.

Often, you can take one look at the bread that a restaurant serves and work out precisely how good or bad your meal will be. If a kitchen cares not for the bread it serves, it may as well give up, because the game is lost.

I noticed this straight away at Saturne. It was hard not to. We had a table right next to a little bread station, a small alcove to house a thick chopping board, a knife, and a hulking pain de campagne, a great beast of a loaf, cracked and dark in crust, purposeful and elegant in crumb.

A waiter approached the loaf in the manner of a priest approaching an altar, taking the knife and turning the bread towards her. She paused for a long moment as if in prayer, knife balanced above crust, before tearing into the loaf in skillful, practiced sweeps, flipping the bread this way and that to produce substantial slices, to be loaded into linen lined baskets and delivered to tables with haste.

I could stop this here.

This is all you need to know about Saturne. That reverence, that care.

It’s a story for the ages.

I asked my brother a few weeks ago where we should eat in Paris. He knows the city’s restaurants well, and reeled off a few names.

“You really should go to Saturne, though. Believe me”.

So we believed him.

There’s no menu. Just seven or eight courses served in typically French style, slowly, over the course of an entire evening. What is a meal for if not to be enjoyed leisurely? The French understand this implicitly. Food is not to be rushed.

I’m not going to run through each and every course, and there were many.

There was a sashimi of white fish served with apricots, an asparagus tempura, a thick slice of duck breast, cooked delicately pink and served with rhubarb. There were nuggets of oyster in a clear bisque with cucumber and elderflowers, lobster with courgette cut and cooked several ways, with a hint of vinegar.

There was a plate of cheese, shaved into thin strips that we doubted we’d finish, but did. There was a chocolate mousse, topped with a chocolate crumble, hiding roasted hazelnuts beneath. The wine list was long and exceptional, and the Joseph Anne Francoise we chose was an unfiltered, natural gem.

Paris is a city of food. It’s reputation as the world’s gastronomic capital is long-standing, and well deserved. People say that it’s impossible to eat badly in Paris, which is of course, utter rubbish, but conversely, it’s easy to eat well. There are many, many great restaurants, and the standards are high.

You may pay handsomely for the privilege, as I did, but you may decide that certain meals, certain times and places, are worth the expense, and this, for me, is what Saturne gave.

A perfect collision of food and wine, service and space that started with a humble loaf of bread.Superb and finessed cooking, wonderful, discreet service, a lovely, Scandinavian-style slightly minimalist dining room, and an exceptional wine list.

Well deserving of its Michelin star for the bread alone.

Saturne

17, rue Notre-Dame des Victoires – 75002 Paris

“So, when you want to order, just write what you want on these cards – this one for drinks and this one for food, and clip them on here, OK?”, said the waiter, pointing upwards to a huge wooden clothes peg dangling from a wire above the table.

It’s a big peg, a very big peg, and a very big gimmick.

We rooted through bags and coats for a pen because there was nothing to write with on the table, despite the whole card/peg/order gimmick, and filled everything in. I had to clip the card into place because Jenny was too short to reach the dangling peg.

The waiter came over and plucked our order down and stood next to the table for ages, transcribing everything off the card into a tablet, and then he read it all back to us, by which time we were both thinking that it might just be more efficient to maybe come over and say something like “can I take your order, please?”, at which point we’d just tell him what we wanted, and he could punch it into the iPad there and then.

Everybody gets that system, right?

But there’s a reason for all this. Chinese restaurants are very formulaic. Fish tank? Gold everywhere? Brusque service? Menu longer than the average novel? Truck-loads of MSG on everything?

None of that at Mans Market.

The entrance, tucked away in a little corner in the new square opposite Leeds’ latest glass faced building, is the sort of place you’d look at and think “yep, there’s a Big 4 accountancy firm in there”, and indeed there is.

Opening the nearly hidden door reveals a stairway decorated floor to ceiling with all kinds of kitsch/gaudy Chinese signs and waving cat statues.

It channels the spirit of Hong Kong.

There’s a bar at the bottom of the stairs, and then around the corner, hidden from view as you descend the stairs, is the restaurant, all white tiles, wood and industrial lighting, with none of the over-the-top theme of the stairway. It’s a surprising juxtaposition, and gives a big hint that this place is doing things differently.

There’s a mercifully short menu – around forty or so dishes in total, mainly classic Chinese food generously re-interpreted.

We worked out the ordering system, and did the whole peg thing, and watched the workings of the open plan kitchen, and really, is there anything more hypnotic than watching a group of chefs working together in a kitchen.

It’s like a type of ballet, but with woks.

We got a couple of drinks, and the waiter asked if we were enjoying them. My glass of water was very good, thanks, designated driver, etc, etc.

First up for food was a massive prawn cracker. Must’ve been a foot long. A good prawn cracker. Our waiter asked us again if everything was OK, and we said that we liked the big prawn cracker. It was very good.

Next, some dim sum and salt and pepper squid – both excellent, spiky flavours clinging to crisp squid, reassuringly heavy dim sum packed with prawns. Again, the waiter, and then a different waiter … yes, lovely food, really good.

Now for some twists. Sweet and sour chicken normally arrives swimming around in a vat of melted sugar masquerading as a sauce, but here it’s presented deconstructed into its constituent parts, chunks of deep-fried chicken skewered and hung from a frame type contraption that means it’s possible to just slide the chicken off the skewer straight down onto the plate, with a small jug of sweet and sour sauce on the side, light and sharp rather than thick and cloying.

A dish of roast duck and char sui pork is presented in a similarly simple way, a duck breast and chunk of pork sliced and laid atop a bed of greens, a rich sauce poured sparingly around. Good, tasty food cooked in a modern and compelling way.

Mans Market has only been open a short while, and it’s obvious that it’s still finding it’s feet a little, hence the overzealous checking up (the food is really, really good … could I just eat it now? Cheers), but that’ll work its way out once the slightly stressed looking bloke in charge of the dining room gets his serving team sorted out properly. Honestly, I don’t envy that job … weekend evenings early on in a restaurant’s life must feel like stepping into Hell, when everything looks OK, and everything should work, but you’ve never actually run the place at full tilt.

Mans Market is clearly trying to reinvent the Chinese restaurant experience, and they do a fine job of it. The place feels modern and contemporary, and the food is wonderful, crisp and clean flavours that leave the clagginess and MSG aftershocks of the average Chinese meal far behind.

Very good value, very charming service, and a very big change from the average Chinese restaurant.

At last, Leeds has a decent Chinese restaurant. At last.

I got home from work last night and dumped my bag in the normal place, the place where it shouldn’t be.

My son was loitering about, and there was something on his mind, something that he didn’t seem to want to ask.

“Dad? Hmmm. Well, I was thinking that seeing as its just us, maybe we could go for a curry, maybe? What do you think? Please say yes.”

Yes, that was a good idea, and I’d already decided that we were going to do exactly that anyway, so he didn’t really need to bother being so bashful.

The big question was ‘where’?

Now, in Bradford, that’s quite a difficult question, because amongst its many charms, Bradford is blessed with a multitude of first-rate Asian restaurants. There’s so much choice that it’s almost embarrassing.

We kicked around a few names, and somebody whose opinion I trust very much indeed suggested on twitter that Mumtaz was the only answer, so Mumtaz it was.

I haven’t been to Mumtaz, that blinged-out temple to curry up Great Horton Road, for many years, but it’s still exactly the same as I remember it – shiny, showy, marbled, slick and a little bit ostentatious. There’s an enormous photo of the Queen eating there during a visit to Bradford. Really, it’s enormous … billboard sized. Everything is huge.

The waiter looked a little taken aback when Ethan ordered a dish of lamb kebab pieces cooked in a rich sauce, pointing out that that particular dish only came in a medium or hot version, not mild. Ethan gave him his best ‘yeah, OK, whatever’ look and ordered it anyway on the basis that a) he was born in Bradford and therefore this sort of stuff is in his genes, and b) he knows that he can take the heat with the best of them, and this is no idle boast because he actually can.

We had a couple of starters first, a plate of onion bhajis laced with coriander and spices, and the single best lamb samosa I’ve ever had, a small parcel of shatteringly crisp, almost filo like pastry wrapped around an explosive package of minced lamb.

Ethan’s kebab dish arrived, the waiter looking mildly frightened as he put it down. I had a lamb karahi, a sizzling pot of meat still bubbling on a charcoal burner as it arrived at the table. Ethan started to eat, picking up a huge chunk of meat with a piece of naan bread, a slight hush descending over the restaurant.

Something was going on.

He clocked it, and rolled his eyes in a withering teenage way.

A different waiter wandered over to ask how the food was. Well, she asked Ethan directly, expecting to find him sat in a heap on the floor in a chilli induced haze. “Really good, thanks! Can I have a fork, please?’

We carried on eating, and later, yet another waiter came to check on The Boy’s progress.

“You enjoying that, then? Food on point, eh?”, he asked, and we replied that the food was indeed “on point”, some of the best Asian food I’ve had in years, in fact.

“That’s good. You eat this at home?”. Yes, we do eat an awful lot of Asian food, and yes, he’s used to the odd chilli. “Sometimes we get people who just can’t hack it, so we get a bit worried”.

Clearly, there’d been some sort of waiting staff bet on whether or not this kebab dish was going to blow Ethan’s head off, and he’d won hands down.

Good lad.

That kebab dish was delicious – big chunks of high quality minced lamb, grilled on a skewer and then finished in a scant, thick sauce piled with red and green peppers. It had heat, but wasn’t monstrous. It was instead robust and balanced – an excellent Asian dish.

Mumtaz sits at the top of the pile of the ‘posh’ end of the Bradford Asian restaurant scene. It’s not particularly cheap (£42 for two starters, two mains, a naan, a couple of really excellent rotis and some drinks), but neither is it ridiculously expensive. There are cheaper places that serve very good food, but Mumtaz has a clear edge, both in the kitchen and the way the place is presented.

They’ve got some lovely staff, too, who are genuinely interested in making sure that their diners enjoy their meals, and that alone goes a very long way.

So, is Mumtaz the best Asian restaurant in Bradford? I don’t know. It’s all personal taste. There’s The International, Aagrah, Akhbar’s, Shimla Spice, Prashad not so far away … but there’s something indefinable about the Mumtaz blend of excellent food, excellent hospitality and a slight sense of the over-the-top that makes it that little bit special.

In Lisbon, there’s a part of the city where your map isn’t likely to help you.

It’s a dense warren of narrow cobblestoned streets and alleyways spread across a hillside. Take one turn, then another, then another, before realising you’re right back where you started. The only certainty is that some streets lead generally uphill, and others down. You start to recognise the same doorways and turnings, the same window boxes, the same bars, but you can never be quite sure.

It’s easy to get lost in Alfama, and that’s a real joy, because this is a real neighbourhood, complete with washing lines, budgies chirping from their balcony-balanced cages, barbecues sizzling with sardines, and people deep in conversation window to window, passing or receiving the day’s’ gossip. To wander around Alfama feels akin to stepping into somebody’s home, and the more you wander, the more familiar it becomes … the same couple of puppies playing in a courtyard, the same woman at work painting tiles, the same kids on their bikes, haring around with little regard for anything.

It’s a wonderful place.

There are restaurants, too, plenty of them.

Santo António de Alfama is tucked into a corner just off one of the main squares, a spot where people sit and listen to the excellent fado trio another of the restaurants on the square proper hosts every night. Many people sit on a certain set of steps, watching the world pass by without realising that just behind their backs hides one of Alfama’s, and indeed Lisbon’s, little jewels.

Under a canopy formed from a huge grape-vine is an open courtyard, surrounded by half a dozen apartments, their front doors and comings and goings mingling with diners sat at slightly battered tables, whilst inside, there are three cosy and warm floors of tables, adding up to a large capacity that can cater for anything from a romantic dinner to a large group meal fairly easily.

Santo António’s food treads the well understood line of Portuguese cuisine – plenty of fish, plenty of meat, lots of potatoes – but with an approach that takes this essential simplicity and makes it much more interesting. Take their appetiser of fried potato skins … a simple dish, just thick slices of potato fried in the style of chips, but served with a lovely piquant mayonnaise. I know the Belgians have done this sort of thing for centuries, but follow that up with something like a beautifully roasted piece of salt cod, served with the greens from a turnip, and it all starts to feel a little special. The same, but different … essentially the same food you can eat in dozens of places around Lisbon, but done a little differently, a little better.

The terrace is a show-stopper on a warm summer night. It’s a wonderful space, and sitting underneath that huge vine, heavy with grapes, while skimming through an exceptional wine list feels very special, but there is more to Santo Antonio’s than a blockbuster opening worthy of the film stars whose photographs festoon the walls. The food matches the billing.

We spent four nights in Lisbon and another week in Portugal, and this was the best food we ate, in the best location. Many gorgeous looking restaurants fail to deliver on the plate, but this is not one of them – it delivers in a simple, relaxed and informal way that leans towards the elegant and sophisticated.

Well worth a quick trip around that corner.

www.siteantonio.com

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We spent some time in Donostia San Sebastián in northern Spain, a beautiful city renowned for its food, and held by many to be the culinary capital of the region, if not the whole of Spain.

Why, then, did we spend a couple of perplexing evenings eating some of the worst food I’ve ever ordered anywhere in the world?

Torrid pasta, limp pizza, thrown-together fish dishes, over-priced, under-value, ill thought through cooking. Terrible, terrible food, only made palatable by wine.

There was a problem, and we quickly worked out that the problem was us. Eating out in San Sebastián is a very, very different affair to doing the same thing in Britain.

Let me explain.

The Spanish conundrum

I need to eat in the evening, at a normal time, maybe 8pm or something like that. When we eat out at home, that’s the sort of time we book a table for. Seems to work OK.

The Spanish customarily eat their evening meal much, much later, at maybe 10pm or beyond. That makes finding a good restaurant that doesn’t fall into the ‘shit tourist racket’ category extremely difficult until a point where I’d be literally on my knees with hunger.

So, how do the good people of San Sebastián do it?

They have a little filler, something to ‘put them on’, as my dear Mum used to say.

Pintxos.

They eat pintxos (spelt with an ‘x’ in Basque, as pinchos in Spanish), the northern Spanish version of tapas … glorious, bite-sized snacks, usually made up of something elaborate on a slice of bread and available strewn casually across every bar in the city, huge waves of bewildering food designed almost entirely to either get you through to a proper meal, or to soak up the alcohol.

It’s a very, very good system, and gives the casual diner the opportunity to taste some extraordinary cooking at knock-down prices. Making pintxos is a competitive sport among most bar and restaurant owners in San Sebastián, and when that sort of thing happens, everybody wins.

Our hastily revised strategy involved embracing the idea of the pintxo wholeheartedly, feeding the kids properly at our apartment before we went out, to avoid the ‘I don’t like that, and I’m going to starve myself in protest’ situation, and hitting the bars for four or five plates of pintxo each … at between 1.8 Euros and 3 Euros a plate, about 10 or 12 Euros worth a head constituted a decent meal. Everybody loved it, and the kids discovered calamari.

The etiquette of ordering pintxos

Picture this.

You walk into a bar. It’s busy. There are people propped up at the bar, huge legs of jamon hanging from the ceiling. You have enough Spanish to order a couple of glasses of white wine to counter the searing heat, even if you spend half your time getting mixed up with the little Italian you know, and eventually end up asking in French. There’s food everywhere, platters full of slices of baguette topped with ham, anchovies, sweet peppers, chorizo.

It’s all quite bewildering, and feels like untrodden ground (in our week in San Sebastián, we bumped into few Britons, and heard little English).

Gesticulation and enthusiastic use of some choice Spanish words is the key. Learn how to say ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’, smile an awful lot and look enthusiastic and you’ll be fine.

The main thing to remember is to indicate that you want to eat first, before taking any food. Don’t just grab the tastiest thing within arm’s reach. The bartender will give you a plate and either let you go, or fill it with whatever you want … just watch what other people do and follow them, and watch what they choose, as well.

It’s customary to run a tab, so the bartender will keep track of what you’ve eaten and the drinks you’ve had, and you pay when you leave. Spanish bartenders seem to have an almost supernatural ability to keep track of all their customers in even the busiest bar, and will be able to present an itemised bill when you want to pay, but I found that trying to stick with the same bartender each time I ordered something made things simpler, or rather, it made me feel like they’d charge me the right amount at the end without any confusion.

Most pintxos are held together with a small wooden toothpick, which is there to help the bartender track your tab as much as it is to maintain the structural stability of your snack, so keep hold of them, and you’ll know roughly how much you’ve spent.

The secrets of the blackboard

The food laid out on the bar looks amazing, but it isn’t likely to be the best they have to offer. Most of the choice dishes are cooked to order and listed on a blackboard behind the bar, or on a menu, which on the odd occasion, might arrive in English. Phew.

Made-to-order dishes include most hot food, such as calamari or croquettes of various types, along with things like hot chorizo sausage or various types of stew or braised dishes. Food can normally be ordered as a racione, effectively a bigger portion, large enough for two people to share.

The real treasures of the pintxo bar are on that blackboard. Point, and say ‘gracias’ a lot.

A little effort will be rewarded, and it’s hard to eat badly in San Sebastián’s heaving pintxo bars. Be adventurous, and try some of the more unusual looking things, or take a chance on something strange from the blackboards. The best trick of them all is simply to park yourself next to a hungry local and watch what they order.

There’s some wonderful food to be had, of many different types in small, tapas style portions that allow people to try several things over the course of an evening, backed by some fiercely good cooking from kitchens determined to out-do their friends and competitors next door.

Just feed the kids before you go out.

Next week: a quick run-down of some of the bars we discovered.

Fish&…that sounds interesting. Go on, then, what is it?

It’s quite a clever little idea.

A nice, blue mobile fish and chip van that rocks up at festivals, parties, events and the like.

We stumbled across it at the glorious Kirkstall Festival the other weekend…a sunny day, fantastic live bands in the Abbey’s cloisters, fairground, local groups with second-hand book stalls…that sort of thing.

Fish and chips? Nice, but…ordinary?

Not so.

Not so at all.

Fish & have a few little twists.  They try a bit harder than your average mobile takeaway. They try harder than your average takeaway, actually…they just happen to be mobile.

For a start, their fish is sourced responsibly from sustainable sources.  It might seem a small point, but it’s an important one given the pressure our oceans and seas are under.

Secondly, and even more importantly, their food is cooked with a bit of a flourish.

Of course, you can get a straight portion of normally battered fish and chips, but that would seem a poor choice up against some of the variations on offer.

I had fish in a lemon, lime and chilli batter, flakes of chilli lodged in a crisp and very light batter.  Enough chilli heat and spice to make a difference, not so much as to kill the taste of the fish.

It was fantastic, unusual and interesting.

Really quite different and very, very tasty.

Anything else?

‘Tapas’ style portions went down a storm with the kids, although the eldest did point out that he’d like a full portion next time, so good were the chips.

There was calamari on offer, fried in that same lemon, lime and chilli batter, as well as mackerel baps, HFW’s invention and one of the tastiest and simplest things I think I’ve ever cooked.

The mackerel bap is almost perfect festival food – easy to cook, easy to hold, easy to eat, good value and nutritious.

To hammer home the point about careful sourcing, the bread rolls for the mackerel baps came from Anthony’s, which is almost showing-off, but they do do exceptionally good bread.

To round out the menu, there was a fish finger sandwich.

Genius.

Fish& are about to launch a second hut at a pitch in central Leeds, and they do pop-up events here there and everywhere.

Thoroughly good food, thoroughly well thought through, and a thoroughly good idea.

Follow Fish& on twitter at @NoFishyBusiness and you can find them on facebook, too.

In retrospect, last Wednesday evening wasn’t the best night for our first visit to the Midnight Bell.

The presence of Arsenal football club at nearby Elland Road for an FA Cup replay against the mighty Leeds United meant that the Bell was packed to the rafters with Leeds fans out for a pre-match drink before walking up the road to the stadium and certain victory.

By half past seven, the place was empty and, it seemed, back to a normal Wednesday night. The slightly harassed staff looked relieved that it was all over.

The Midnight Bell is on of Leeds Brewery’s growing chain of eclectic bars and pubs, and sits alongside the brilliant PIN, the Brewery Tap and the newly acquired Garden Gate.

As you’d expect in any pub owned by a brewery as good as Leeds Brewery, the beer is great. At least three of the brewery’s own beers are on tap, with Midnight Bell the best of the bunch, a very good dark mild with a bit of chocolate in it. Very civilised.

I’m going to be fair about this, but there’s no easy way of saying it.

The food could have been better.

Some of it was pretty good – some lovely gravadlax and a nice prawn cocktail (actually, the prawn cocktail, a retro-Seventies throwback concoction, was bloody fantastic), but some of the other dishes had suffered from a little over cooking.

I had a game pie, with a suet crust that had spent a few minutes too long in the oven, leaving the crust far darker than it should have been. There wasn’t any game in it, either, as far as I could tell, unless you count beef as game, that is. The filling was really very, very good, but not game, and the whole pie was let down by the burnt crust. The chips on the side were a bit overcooked, too, as was a medium-rare steak, which was more medium-well done.

I think these were just a couple of mistakes, for which I’m going to blame Arsenal, and because of that, I’d definitely go back.

And the match?

Leeds lost 3-1 to a superior and clinical Arsenal side, although Wenger did have to bring on Van Persie and Fabregas to finish them off following an absolutely screaming first half goal from Leeds’ Bradley Johnson.

Exciting, but inevitable.

I’m not very good at planning things properly, which is how we ended up at Sela the other night. It was quite accidental.

We’d planned to eat at The Reliance, but found it stuffed to the rafters with Christmas party type people, with a table waiting list that may have stretched into January.  So, we needed a quick alternative, and landed on Sela, a couple of doors down from the brilliant North Bar.

Sela Bar, downstairs, has been around for a while now, but the restaurant upstairs is a new venture.  It’s had some fairly good reviews, and more importantly, they had a table free on a nippy evening.

So, did it live up to the reviews?

Yes.  Sort of.

A couple of the specials weren’t available, which I found out after deciding that I wanted both of them, which was a bit deflating, and then they ran out of Hoegarden…

Anyway, we did get some food, and very good it was too.  I’ve never been able to cook pheasant properly – it always turns out too tough when I do it, but my half a pan fried pheasant was great, really well cooked and presented.  I could have eaten the other half.  A risotto was great too – packed with flavour and cooked exactly like a risotto should be (ie, not to a complete mulch), even if it was a little on the cool side.

Best of all, though – and I make no apologies for this – our bowl of chips was out of this world.  Crisp on the outside, soft in the middle, obviously hand cut.  Proper chips.  Hurray!

I quite enjoyed our meal at Sela.  It’s a nice little place with a short menu that’s well cooked.  On a weekend, I can see it having a real buzz and atmosphere.

Definitely worth a look, especially as North is so close.

Leeds Brewery have been quietly expanding in Leeds over the last few years.

They’ve now got four pubs and bars, each with a distinct identity and reason. PIN is their ‘contemporary cafe bar’, a small bar and restaurant tucked away on Dock Street, just over the river.

Given that PIN is a Leeds Brewery bar, it almost goes without saying that they’ve got Leeds Best and Pale on tap, and very good they are too. The cocktail list is long and impressive, but it’s great to see a couple of pumps full of proper beer right at the front. It shows that the place has a bit of heart and soul.

The food is very good. There’s nothing that unusual or exotic on the menu, but it’s all good, relaxed and comfortable food, the sort of food that, if you’re honest, you probably really like to eat.

We had some skewers or jerk chicken and some deep fried brie to start. The chicken had a good kick to it and was very tender, and the other starter was a chunk of breaded and deep fried cheese, so, really, what’s not to like?

A house-special type burger came next. The burger was a huge beast of a thing, a long, thick slab of seasoned ground beef in a toasted bun. The waitress asked if I wanted cheese and bacon on it, which of course I did, because refusing bacon and cheese on a burger is just plain stupid.  So I got bacon and cheese. Lots of it.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about PIN’s chips, and the hype didn’t disappoint. These were chips cut by hand from big potatoes and fried at least twice. Proper chips with rustic, mis-matched sizes, the give away clue that your chips have been made properly.

We also had a steak, cooked medium-rare. It was actually medium-rare, which hardly ever happens. I also spotted a plate of fish and chips coming out of the kitchen that nearly made me fall off my chair. Those chips again, with a huge slice of crisp fish on top of them. Next time…

There was a dessert, too, sticky toffee pudding, which smelt great and which, I’m told, tasted as good as it looked.

A great meal in a fantastic, atmospheric little bar that’s run well by people who know what they’re doing.

www.pinleeds.co.uk