So, there’s no tea in the teapot. No teabags, I mean. Or tea leaves. None at all.
And yes, I know what you’re thinking: isn’t this meant to be about Northcote, Lisa Goodwin Allen’s northern powerhouse of an eating house, where she does magnificent things with chickens and raspberries and quiches and scallops? It is. And yet, here am I, banging on about tea.
Why? Because, while there’s plenty to say about the food, the fact remains that there was no tea in the teapot, which felt strangely emblematic of the Northcote experience — a restaurant I was incredibly excited about, and left desperate to have loved more.
We’ll get to that — but we can take our time getting to them, because there are an awful lot of things to cover that were nothing short of spectacular. I should say up front that I’m a bit of a Goodwin Allen fanboy. In the pandemic, I would sit puppyishly at my computer, waiting for the latest “Northcote at Home” box to drop, and while it might be stretching things to say that her low-and-slow chicken was one of the reasons we left London and moved to Yorkshire, I’ll be honest, it would only be stretching things a bit.
The thing to do at Northcote is the tasting menu. Firstly, as ever, snacks. Things start with a ludicrously intense layered, cheesy delight, served in an eggshell (because sometimes if you can, you should). It is the kitchen’s “riff on a quiche”, in the same way that a 747 is Boeing’s riff on jumping. After it, the frivolously monikered “mushroom sandwich”, which packs more flavour into a mouthful than lesser restaurants pack into an evening.
These hits of flavour keep on coming: the scallop starter, with a plump, almost fruity scallop porcupined with crispy discs of confit potato. The tomatoes, a dish seemingly designed to put those people who claim you can only get decent tomatoes in Spain firmly in their place, that doesn’t so much as wrap you in its sweet-yet-acidic embrace as smother you in it, leaving you gasping both for air, and for a simpler time when all other tomato-based foodstuffs hadn’t been ruined for you. And I can’t talk about the elderflower snow, else I’ll get teary.
After was a distant cousin of that first, enduring lockdown chicken, with preternaturally moist flesh, rich, decadent stuffing forced under the crispy skin, and still eminently worth displacing your family to the north of England for. And then, finally, a raspberry dessert to wrap it all up, where fresh raspberries arrived plated with raspberry gels and crunchy discs of raspberry boiled sweets. A dish incredibly fresh, and yet so deep I half expected it to light up a Gauloise and quote Montaigne.
The only bum note was the monkfish, which was only a bum note when compared to surrounding symphony — beautifully cooked, with a sweet, juicy pilpil prawn sitting on top, but strangely bland, and the chilli threads a bit chewy and tasteless.
And then there were petits fours: one was a bit like a Madeleine, one was a chocolate shaped like some kind of flower, and one was some kind of green jelly. All excellent, if a little blurry.
So why on earth am I kvetching about tea, you may ask? Well, the reason I’m slightly wobbly on the petits fours is because we had them in our room, because by the time we finished the dessert it was so late we were about to fall asleep at the table.
We finished late because we’d started late — having been asked to report to the lounge bar at 7.30 in advance of our 8pm reservation, we were still sitting there at twenty past eight, having been staring at empty glasses for nigh on half an hour. Wine, from the delightful if mildly unadventurous flight, was poured for the next course, and then finished before that next course had arrived (because it took ages to arrive, to be clear, not because we were Mickey Flanagan-ing it). And then, at breakfast the next morning, having waited twenty minutes for the tea to arrive, we left it to brew in the pot for a while longer, because we both like it on the stronger side, only to realise there was no actual tea in the pot, and we’d both just been letting the pot get cold.
Little things. But little things that add up; and little things that when you’re paying the prices Northcote is charging, you have every right not to expect. So yes: frustrating. Northcote is a place that gets pretty much all the big things right: the food is fantastic, the cocktails well-mixed, every single person we spoke to was an absolute bloody delight. And yet. Little things.
Still: it’s a meal I’d happily travel to the Ribble Valley for again. But honestly. Someone tell them to just leave the teabags in the bloody pot.
Northcote Road, Langho, Blackburn, BB6 8BE, northcote.com
