Northcote takes spring in its stride via the Chef’s Table or the Gourmet Menu

I’m going to treat myself to all the Spring Gourmet Menu dishes pictured above and below. To celebrate an eight year anniversary of mine, coming up in June. OK, my day in their new Cookery School doesn’t even count as a footnote in the garlanded history of Northcote. The stalwart country house hotel had already […]

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Location, location, fermentation, as I go star Gueuze-ing in a virtual Belgium

The weekend the clocks go forward 2002 and Jester King Spontan is guest pour at Dukes Bar, Halifax. That’s if there’s any left after the Friday being designated as ‘Sponzee Day – celebrating the iconic spontaneously fermented barrel sour’. Unimaginable even a few years ago for such an event in a provincial craft beer outpost; […]

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Buzzing Kampus will benefit from The Beeswing – help it take flight with sweet cash

It’s far from up there with P&O’s unceremonious mass cull of their crews but one of the more unsavoury moments in a troubled 2021 for the hospitality trade was Bruntwood’s decision to dispense with vin-yard, a bijou independent wine bar/shop at its Hatch ‘retail and leisure destination’ on Manchester’s Oxford Road. The landlord’s apparent reason […]

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Marble, Cloudwater… Sureshot. How James Campbell rules the Hopiverse

Not a Punk IPA in sight (thankfully) but the unveiling of Sureshot Brewing’s debut quartet of beers offered a bizarre echo of a seminal Sex Pistols gig, also in Manchester,  a lifetime ago. The seeds of this fanciful link were sown by my brother – like myself, old enough to have been in the Lesser […]

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North California Dreaming of Pinot Noir, Redwoods and Sunsets – 10 reasons to hit the highway

‘Never go back down those country roads’ might be the advice of some plaintive troubadour or a stressed-out Sat Nav, but when it’s Northern California how could I resist? My previous trip to the Napa Valley and Sonoma had been a wine-soaked idyll from sumptuous bases in Relais & Chateaux properties, but the simpler pleasures […]

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