Queens Wine Bar and Bistro, 8-10 Queen Avenue, Liverpool L2 4TX (0151 345 6646). Starters £6.50-£9, mains £14-£27, desserts £7, wines from £18
On the morning my train to Liverpool pulled out of London Euston, the media was full of images of other trains: crowded ones, filled with terrified people, fleeing for their lives, an invading Russian army at their backs. I, meanwhile, was going to lunch. That morning Philippa Perry, this newspaper’s agony aunt, was also on a train. With time on her hands, she invited her Twitter followers to ask her anything. Among the many questions was one about how we should deal with the terrible news from Ukraine, especially if we are prone to anxiety.
Philippa replied with her familiar brand of wisdom. We should, she said, “Stay in the present and not the hypothetical mythical future. Deal with what is, not what might be. Remember to enjoy yourself as much as possible. It doesn’t help anyone if you don’t enjoy yourself.” It made an awful lot of sense to me. And now I’ll add a thought or two of my own. These thoughts will look like the terrible self-justifications of a man who, in a time of war, is merely reporting from the frontline of lunch. Self-justifications they may be. That doesn’t necessarily make them wrong.
People fleeing war want to be safe. They want to be free of the terror of injury or death, free of the fear of the destruction of their families and their homes and their country. But beyond that what they want, what we all want, is normality: to be able go to work, to look after ourselves and our families, to live free of repression and to be able to enjoy ourselves by going to the movies, or yes, out to lunch. We shouldn’t be casual about the importance of normality or dismiss it as irrelevant in a time of dreadful emergency. We should treasure it.
Because there’s something else. We are all of us smart enough to hold more than one thought in our heads at a time. We can deplore the appalling barbarity of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while also wondering where to go for a nice meal out. I’m not big on grandstanding statements about the meaning of life, but I do propose that having a nice time should be a part of it.
So let me introduce you to Queens Wine Bar and Bistro in Liverpool which, in dark days, can show you a very nice time indeed. It’s one of those quiet, unassuming places which, without fuss or bother, gets things right in a comforting rather than a self-congratulatory way; where the starters are priced in single digits and the mains are mostly in the mid-teens; where the wine list is engineered to enable you to drink rather than show off. It’s located down Queen Avenue, a narrow shopping arcade of handsome Grade II listed buildings which even the Liverpool Echo once described as one of the city’s “best-kept secrets”.
Queens opened in the summer of 2019. In pandemic years, that means it’s barely been feeding people for 12 months, though it feels older: heavily varnished floorboards, dark green walls, wood tables and fatly cushioned banquettes in the bay windows. Next to us is a gentleman of a certain age in a chalk-striped suit, eating alone. He asks for a glass of the “best claret you have”, as if channelling Withnail. The waiter gives him the quiet reassurance reserved for regulars. It’s the kind of place where being a regular would seem like a fine idea.
The food is true to the word “bistro”. It involves encouraging ingredients with the occasional flourish, but with nothing to make the eyes widen with too much curiosity, or to distract you from the conversation you’re having over that glass of crisp vinho verde, a blackboard special at £7 a glass. There are cheese croquettes made with Blacksticks Blue, or salt-baked beetroot with hazelnuts and a blood-orange salad. Smoked mackerel toasts are dainty slices of toasted baguette. The fish has been bound in a horseradish cream, then topped in turn by ribbons of pickled onion and dribbles of good peppery olive oil. There are cornichons on the side. Today’s special is a brown crab rarebit so yes, something else on toast, but I’m not complaining: there’s lots of white crab meat packed in there beneath a glazed topping, heavy with the insistent seafood funk of the brown. With it is a vivid salad of radicchio, shaved fennel and capers. It’s a beauty.
A large serving of glossy mussels for £15 comes with a mess of cooked-down leeks, in a confidently spiced Café de Paris sauce which is just the right shade of creamy beige. They bring one bowl for the shells and another in which you can clean your fingers. If you don’t need to use the finger bowl, you aren’t doing the mussels properly. A third bowl is full of the frite part of moules frites. They are far too thick-cut to justify the title. Any self-respecting Belgian would disapprove. But we are in Liverpool, not Antwerp. These are site-specific chunky chips. More importantly, they clearly came from this kitchen rather than the ubiquitous freezer bag. They rustle against each other, and have many golden crevices. My companion and I fight each other for them, then mop them in the Café de Paris sauce.
The quenelle of celeriac “choucroute” with a pork ribeye, served pink, is closer to a rough purée but I’m not going to get hung up on nomenclature. It lubricates the meat very nicely, alongside a dollop of apple sauce. A side dish of hispi cabbage, the go-to brassica of modern times, is the good kid who’s started hanging out with the wild crowd. What was once a bowl of green veg is now embraced by a fabulously sticky, russet and mahogany mess of crisp lardons and pearl onions in a hugely savoury reduced sherry sauce.
Desserts are designed to sustain you through a cold, rainy day in Liverpool: Basque cheesecake, buttermilk rice pudding with honey and nutmeg, crème caramel. We locate space for a slice of a well-made malt and dark chocolate tart, with a filling the colour of a night sky, beautifully thin pastry and a good scoop of chantilly cream on the side. Let’s be clear. None of this will make the world a better place. None of it will make the bad things stop. But enjoying it really won’t make things worse, and it may make you feel a little better. That’s all we can ask of lunch.
News bites
It’s a big hello to Trampoline, a new café in London’s Islington offering employment opportunities and training to refugees. Trampoline has been founded by the people behind Nemi Teas, and is a partnership with Groundwork, a group of London charities focused on poverty action and the environment, and Hotel School, which provides training in hospitality to the homeless and vulnerable as a way of helping them into employment. Trampoline has also pledged to work with other food-based social enterprises including Redemption Roasters, the world’s first prison-based coffee business. At trampolinecafe.com.
Mission Mars, the company behind the Bavarian-themed bar and restaurant Albert’s Schloss in Manchester, is to open an outpost on Bold Street in Liverpool this autumn. It’s set over two floors and will clearly be vast, with two bars, a bakery, a restaurant seating 500 guests, a fresh tank beer system and a stage for live music. Visit albertsschloss.co.uk.
There was a palpable sense of gloom in London’s restaurant world when it was announced that Honey and Co, Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packers’ much loved Middle Eastern café, was having to close after a decade as their lease was up. However, they have now found new premises. They are taking over the site of what was Cigala on Lamb’s Conduit Street in London’s Bloomsbury and should reopen over the next couple of months. See honeyandco.co.uk.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
