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Picky bits and a bolleke mean it’s hard to stray from delicious deli Wandering Palate

Showing my age. Just realised it’s 30 years since I sat down in the cinema to watch Delicatessen. I expected a celebration of pastrami on rye and coffee-toting waitresses with attitude. Instead I was served a post-apocalyptic, cannibalistic black comedy packed with butchered body parts.  I blame a movie made two years earlier for my […]

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Pannage your porcine assets! Why I’m hog-tied to Hampshire’s ancient Forest this autumn

I came late to The New Forest National Park and it has found a nest in my heart. This 550sq km patch of ancient England is an all-year-round destination, but autumn is particularly alluring when the russet woodland plays host to Pannage. This is the practice of releasing domestic pigs into a forest (also known […]

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Lion’s mane parfait and whipped salmon belly… Why Fallow is dear to my ethical heart

Fish heads? I have form for devouring them. Witness the board below at the late, lamented Umezushi in Manchester. That was 2018 (note the prices) and I went for the hamachi. So the dish-determined-to-surprise on the menu at Fallow held no fears. Dowsed in a sriracha emulsion, the smoked cod’s head held plenty of crannies […]

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Mountain bread that rules two nations – House of Habesha’s Injera levels are high

Giles Coren famously wrote that he’d walk to Manchester barefoot in the rain for one more mouthful of Simon Rogan’s chopped raw rib-eye in coal oil at The French. That was amazingly a decade ago and, to put it kindly, his return visits to the city have been sporadic since. The Times critic’s most recent […]

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Polyspore: I came on a mushroom quest and stumbled upon the beetles as new number one act

It was the start of a voyage of discovery that took in cultivating my own King Blue mushrooms and encountering bizarrely beautiful beetles in a former iron foundry, the complexities of the World Wood Web and the future of insects as our planet’s food. Stockport was where the trail began… No meal at Where The […]

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