Galleria is an all-day restaurant tacked on to the side of Project House, a new (or at least new-ish) arts venue not far from Leeds city centre. People who don’t know Leeds or what it’s like – let’s, for the sake of argument, call them southerners – often imagine it to be a rough-and-ready place full of brash Yorkshire pragmatists who have absolutely no time for pretentiousness. Well, they’re wrong. Leeds has always been chock-full of some of Britain’s greatest dandies, dreamers and creative crackpots. I blame the university, the Industrial Revolution and something in the drinking water from the Royd Moor Reservoir.
Project House, a collaboration between several local artistic groups – Brudenell Social Club, Belgrave Music Hall, the Welcome skate store and Super Friendz – is a 1,000-person-capacity venue with a restaurant attached, and a great example of Leeds in full weird-and-wonderful mode. Go for the “equilibrium retreat”, the rave bingo, the all-day desi festival and the “bring your own brood” mass yoga sessions, and stay for a whole wood-fired chicken with confit garlic, home fries, butterhead lettuce and dip, all cooked by chef Andy Castle, previously of Ox Club, a grill restaurant 10 minutes up the road.
Galleria’s menu, it has to be said, is much, much more enticing than your average arts centre cafe-bar’s – there’s not a limp slice of quiche or a thawed-out coffee and walnut cake in sight. Stale, mass-produced scones and dry ciabatta in fancy galleries are among my ultimate first world bêtes noires. At Galleria, however, the menu reads incredibly well even before a bite or slurp has been taken: three-cheese croque madame on wood-fired flatbread, southern fried bream with a kohlrabi and fenugreek remoulade, hash brown stuffed with sugar pit bacon and, on the drinks menu, smoked bloody marys.
Fluffy, salty, judiciously charred flatbreads come with a variety of toppings: mortadella, smoked pineapple, mustard and jalapeño; pulled lamb’s leg with kalamata olives, black garlic and mint; or tomato, crispy chilli butter and wild oregano. These flatbreads, like all great art, take a lot of time and love to create, beginning life at least 42 hours before they’re eaten – first as a biga, an Italian pre-ferment – which is then combined with malt and water before it goes through an arduous proving process. It’s then divided into small bundles of joy, grilled over fire and served with something drizzly, something scoopable and something crunchy.
Forgive me for all the detail, but Galleria’s flatbreads are truly intoxicating – they are essentially the daily bread that I spent every morning at methodist primary school asking God to give us. I ate one with whole barbecued purple carrots, blackened further by the flames and arranged like a goat’s horns, while the flatbread came dappled with scorch marks to the point of leopardprint, before being given a smear of silky, fresh hummus and a scattering of a crunchy, fiery, yet at the same time delicate take on bombay mix. When it arrived, I stared at it agog, not wanting to ruin its sheer beauty with my greed. The dish is vegan, but I defy any meat-eater to argue that it would be improved by the addition of a pork chop. A dish of Turkish eggs, ’nduja butter, whipped goat’s curd and hot honey was similarly gorgeous, and came with yoghurt, the warm, buttery, paprika notes of aleppo chilli and another of those warm, soft flatbreads to scoop through the drippy poached egg yolks that merged with the cool, balm-like garlic yoghurt sauce.
Galleria’s menus from breakfast through to dinner cherrypick lovely, snacky things from around the world – from France, Greece, the USA, Asia, north Africa – but what unites them is Castle’s thoughtful, complex, fresh approach.
It’s far from the cosiest restaurant you’ll ever go to – by daytime, it’s a rather starkly pale, casual space, and it’s by no means a dress-up-in-your-Sunday-best place – but then, it never claimed to be. At the same time, however, this is not a coffee spot next to a yoga hall that does eggs and posh pizza.
Even if you did just pop by Galleria for a cake and a cup of Yorkshire tea, the sweet things on offer are all freshly made, and very nicely, too. We ate an incredible zesty key lime pie and a big chunk of pecan pie topped with whole nuts, both of which featured a thick, buttery pastry base.
Leeds may still be as eccentric as ever, but it now has an arts venue cafe that’s way more appetising than 90% of the places in our so-called capital city.
Galleria Project House, Armley Road, Leeds LS12, 0113 821 4029. Open brunch/lunch Mon-Sun, 10am-2pm; dinner Thurs-Sat, 5-9pm. From about £15 a head at lunch and £30 a head at dinner, both plus drinks and service
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