Fletchers at Grantley Hall, Ripon, North Yorkshire, HG4 3ET (01765 620 070, grantleyhall.co.uk). Starters £12.50-£19.50, mains £24-£50, desserts £11.50-£14, wines from £34
I arrived at Grantley Hall on time for my booking, and still I was late for my table. That was because of the long drive from the front gates, through a huge pool-table baize of manicured lawns, to the car park. It was followed by the challenge of finding a space amid the Porsche and Tesla charging points. We then had to stride back through the car park pretending we belonged there, sweetly serenaded by the soft piano jazz being piped at us disconcertingly through the undergrowth.
We went along the length of the mighty building, popped inside and through a padded cell of thickly carpeted, wood-panelled chambers to get to Fletchers, the hotel’s brasserie. Admittedly, we did pause to gawp at the display cases of mere fripperies available to purchase, including diamond-infested bracelets topping out at £9,295. Eventually, we got to the dining room.
You get the point. Grantley Hall, a grand 17th-century Yorkshire pile, opened as a five-star hotel in 2019 and is over-engineered to within an inch of its gilded, primped and polished life. It belongs to Valeria Sykes, who invested £70m in the conversion after divorcing businessman and Brexit donor Paul Sykes. Facilities include a pool, snow and steam rooms, a gym, a chamber for altitude training, an underwater treadmill, a cryotherapy chamber – nope, me neither – and a 3D body scanner that can check bone density. Who needs a digestif when you can have your bone density investigated after lunch instead?
I am aware that all this comes across as reverse snobbery; as a performative sneer at the excesses of the overly moneyed. Terrific. That’s the intention. Grantley Hall is hilariously over the top. It’s where any reasonable perspective on life goes to die. It houses a bunch of restaurants, including a faux après-ski café, which doubtless Yorkshire has long been desperate for, as well as a joint fusing “Yorkshire produce and Far Eastern flavours”. Then there’s the flagship restaurant of Shaun Rankin, formerly of Ormer, which offers a 10-course tasting menu each evening at £130 a head and which has so far been represented by three different PR companies. All of them have encouraged me to go.
No thanks. I was much more interested in the brasserie, partly because it’s the place you’d actually go to eat the rest of the time if you were staying at the hotel, and partly because I like to imagine Fletchers was named after Ronnie Barker’s character in Porridge. I assume it isn’t, though I could find nothing on the website explaining the name. I did, however, find a neat little bit of coding by the web designer: the tab in Chrome for the restaurant page reads “Best places to Eat in Yorkshire”.
I won’t lie. I’m not entirely convinced that’s true. It’s not a bad restaurant. The staff are cheery, despite being forced to wear name badges like it’s a Harvester. And we can all enjoy a bit of mock Scottish baronial. There’s some tartan padding on the chairs. An open fire gutters. But the whole venture is both confused and asphyxiatingly expensive for what it is. Then again, that cryotherapy chamber isn’t going to pay for itself, is it?
The dishes read like somebody once stopped outside the Wolseley in London and had a quick shufti of their menu, without bothering to actually eat there. At first it all seems to be designed to comfort and feed rather than to astonish you. Then again, the £25.50 charged for the beer-battered fish with an actual Jenga of chips, might well achieve both at the same time. You can have smoked salmon sandwiches at lunchtime for £16.50, or a chicken salad with avocado and gem lettuce for £21.
Much of the rest of it is, however, detailed and precise and just exhaustingly fussy. A single smoked haddock and spring onion fish cake for £14.50 arrives ringed by a neurotic circle of herb oil that appears to be there only for framing rather than flavour. There’s an honour guard of vinegared anchovies placed just so over the top and a perfect disc of very good tartare sauce underneath. The fish cake itself is heavy on the potato, light on the fish.
In another starter, a breast of pigeon is beautifully cooked, but the plate is splattered rather than sauced, and it looks like someone has used a centimetre ruler to carve the cubes of underwhelming black pudding. So it continues. I can admire the technique in the cooking of a piece of venison loin, or the zip of the braised red cabbage beneath. Quite right, too, at £32. But why announce a faggot and then present something so lacking in visceral shout? A good faggot should be literally gutsy. This one seems ashamed of itself. A plate of stone bass with squid, braised fennel, saffron and fennel purée and a red pepper butter sauce reads like a love letter to the French Mediterranean coast; it tastes like it was cooked by someone who went there on their holidays, but didn’t enjoy it at all. The flavours are restrained and muted. Still, there’s always the chips. Curiously, they remind me of the ones in the bag at the bottom of my freezer. Tough trick to pull off, that.
And then the desserts arrive. Oh boy. They are brilliant; some of the very best examples of detailed patisserie work it has been my pleasure to experience in a long time. A paper-thin, white-chocolate cuff encloses the lightest of sponges, topped by a rhubarb crémeux, in turn enclosing a silky rhubarb gel; a chocolate and stout cake comes layered with various ethereal mousses inside a perfect dark-chocolate cylinder. It’s accompanied by a dome of chocolate ganache and a biscuit sandwich enclosing an Irish cream frozen parfait. Both these astonishing desserts cost around £13. I can’t begrudge a penny of it. They feel like dishes from an entirely different restaurant; one that knows what it wants to be and how to deliver that.
As I’ve already said, this review is thickly buttered with snark. I think it’s reasonable. Our bill for three courses with no wine is just shy of £150 and while we come out singing a hymn of praise to the desserts, we only mutter irritably about the rest of it. Ah well. It’s something to get us through the long journey ahead of us; the one all the way back to the front gate.
News bites
The ever-restless chef and restaurateur Gary Usher of north west-based Elite Bistros has announced plans to crowdfund £2m by selling shares in the company. Previous crowdfunders, used to launch new restaurants, have offered rewards, including meals and merchandise. The new funds, he says, will finance the opening of three further restaurants to go alongside the likes of Sticky Walnut, Wreckfish, Burnt Truffle and Hispi. He also says he has plans for a tapas-style restaurant (elitebistros.com).
Fresh from becoming the first restaurant in Wales to be awarded two Michelin stars, chef-patron Gareth Ward of Ynyshir in Machynlleth, Powys, has announced he is to open his own pub. Once planning approval is given it will be built on land behind the restaurant and, he told industry magazine The Caterer, should be open by the end of the year. ‘The overheads are massive at Ynyshir,’ he said, ‘And the land will help pay its way.’ (ynyshir.co.uk).
The full hospitality business Covid numbers are in. Industry body UKHospitality has calculated that the restaurant sector lost around £115bn in sales during 2020 and 2021 as a result of the pandemic. Kate Nicholls, chief executive of the organisation, is calling on the government to keep VAT for hospitality at 12.5% rather than return it to 20%, to help the sector recover.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
