Tag Archive for: Beer

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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 on the side seduced me too.

Hence a planned two week road trip between San Francisco and Seattle had to include some blissed-out backwoodsmanship and watching ocean sunsets with chilled IPAs. 

Here are 10 places along the route where we ditched the hire car and went native…

Ram’s Gate Winery

OK, so a vineyard had to be our gateway. Ram’s Gate is possibly the closest winery to San Francisco, so perfect for a wine tasting lunch. It’s set on a hill off State Route 121 heading for Sonoma among its own 28 acres of vines, but since its inception in 2011 its terroir-driven selling point has been its handling of small-lot Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes from across Sonoma and Carneros. 

The very definition of a Californian boutique winery, it is architecturally stunning. Inside it’s vintage chic, almost clublike; from the outside it lives up to its claim to be a modern interpretation of the weathered farmsteads of old Carneros, while below the vine-clad hill the wildlife habitat, Tolay Creek, signals the sustainable ethos.

Ram’s Gate is open Thursday-Monday , 11am-4pm, for tasting appointments. We went the whole hog and had the $160 a head Five Course Wine and Food Pairings, featuring  the likes of saffron poached lobster and pasta, smoked bavette, raspberry shortcake with brown sugar chantilly. Out on the terrace, naturally with some lovely wines.

Jordan Vineyard & Winery

Another winery, can’t resist, but the vineyard tour here is something special. You can spot the French influence on this chateau-stykled family winery, which opened back in 1971 and is single-minded about producing just two wines – a Cabernet Sauvignon Bordeaux blend and a Chardonnay. Tasting both in a luxury hilltop gazebo overlooking the  entire 1,200 estate with some seriously gourmet small plates was the culmination of a tour that took in a look at their own organic veg garden and apiary, natural habitat, a tasting of their own estate olive oil and real insights into vineyard practice. You can understand why it has won a clutch of awards. The three hour tour costs $150 plus tax; available May-October only, weather permitting. More affordable is theWinery Tour & Library Tasting, which features wine tasting with food pairings for $75 plus tax. 

Healdsburg

My, how this town has gentrified, gussied itself up big time, especially around the central lawned Plaza. When I first visited a quarter of a century ago there was hardly a bespoke tasting room in town. Hell, this was Sonoma, not Napa; you had to go out into the country and find the winemakers. Now a raft of grape-driven opportunities rub shoulders with designer shops and small batch coffee haunts. Still it’s undeniably attractive and some favourite spots remain – the Hotel Les Mars, where we stayed last time, and the homely Oakville deli/cafe on the Plaza, but the raucous Bear Republic brewpub just off the main drag has bitten the dust. Fear not they are still brewing elsewhere that quintessential West Coast IPA, Racer 5. After a couple we started noticing more the hardware stores and simpler liquor stores of an older Healdsburg; the apple orchards and ranches that dot the Sonoma hinterland – a world away from the polished wine palaces and their millionaire owners in Napa.

The Bohemian Highway

Definitely a world away from Napa. This was the country road we needed to get back on and it didn’t disappoint. Our destination was a log cabin lodging with ocean views at Jenner at the mouth of the kayak-thronged Russian River. Direct way from Healdsburg is the 116 up the valley, but we mooched further south towards Sebastopol to join the Bohemian Highway

Rarely has a road so lived up to its name. Orchards, redwood groves, vineyards and grazing land are the heavenly backdrop to laid-back small settlements. Occidental and Monte Rio are folksy cute, but Freestone, official population 50, is my favourite. Mainly because it’s home to the Wildflour Bakery and Freestone Artisan Cheese store, an essential stop on the California Cheese Trail.

Wildflour boasts a wood-fired brick oven, lit each afternoon with a wheelbarrow of eucalyptus kindling. Scones and all kinds of delights are produced, but it is the Organic Sourdough that rules supreme. Thick of crust and yet airy-light inside (even the rye variety), this is the best bread you’ll find anywhere.

At the cheese store affineur Omar Muller sells locally pressed olive oil, almonds and walnuts and a range of dairy-related artefacts, but the glory is the cheese. Try the local Bleeting Heart sheep’s or more widely available cheeses from the Cowgirl Creamery. A bottle of Pinot Noir from the nearby Joseph Phelps completes the picnic.

River’s End Restaurant & In, Jenner 

A tea-time sea fret shrouded the extended estuary of the Russian River. It grew thicker as we checked into the River’s End Inn and settled into our cabin. What chance a glimpse of their legendary sunset from our wooden porch? There were going to be few other distractions. With no cellphone or internet accessibility, no telly, we could have been back in the days when it was built as a wayside inn for loggers and fishermen.

Maybe they would have tucked into a large helping of elk, as I did; the difference surely the finesse with which mine was treated by chef Martin Recoder and it wouldn’t have been imported from New Zealand! Food miles concerns apart – and no problems with the King Salmon starter – this was an extraordinarily fine meal, the best of our whole road trip, even the sophistication of the service belying the rusticity of the Inn. And the wine? It had to be a Littorai Pinot Noir – perfection from legendary winemaker Ted Lemon. We’d visited his biodynamic vineyard above Sebastopol, where the cooling clouds roll in off the Pacific (main image). As if to cue, the clouds here suddenly cleared like ‘curtains up’ to reveal a glorious sunset finale.

Gualala and Point Arena

It’s a switchback car ride north on Highway 1, the Pacific on port side smashing into coves hundreds of feet below. There a few choice stop-offs to catch your breath and get closer to the ocean, notably Salt Point State Park, which has a winding, wooded path down to a sheltered cove. Twenty-five minutes further on and worth a longer visit is Gualala Point, at the mouth of the river of that name. We wandered through the dunes onto a driftwood-littered sand spit and then clambered up the headland, which promised whale watching but didn’t deliver on the day. A further 25 minutes north you hit Point Arena, centred on the lighthouse of that name but pulling in 1,600 acres of National Monument Land, a vast coastal preservation reserve. Fascinating to explore, we’re told, but we had to settle for a sea view, craft beer and San Francisco-style chowder (in a hollowed out sourdough bap) at the Pier Chowder House and Tap Room down by the pier in the historic district.

Albion River Inn

Star brew we tasted at the Pier was a G&T Sour Beer from Anderson Valley Brewery, a craft pioneer 30 years ago and still going strong. On our last visit to Anderson Valley we explored its cool climate vineyards, but this time were happy to go down the hop route – check out Visit Mendocino’s 9 Hop Stops at ABV’s beautifully-situated taproom, enjoying another approachable sour, the Briney Melon variety. We had to resist completism; we were en route for our next lodging, the Albion River Inn – like River’s End on a bluff at the river mouth. The clifftop views were equally spectacular but the style of lodging quite different. More romantic than rustic, with spa baths and panoramic decking.

Similarly high standards in the kitchen serving superb seafood to an 80 cover restaurant, set apart from the 22 room/suite complex and built out of wood salvaged from a 1919 shipwreck.

Mendocino

The Albion River Inn was our base to visit Mendocino, a 10 minute drive north up Highway 1, along which you can sense the locations of one of California’s most gripping and gritty literary fictions, Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling (4th Estate, £12.99). It wonderfully evokes the stunning coastal landscape (though might deter you from going camping!). Mendocino itself was as laid-back as ever. Old hippies and floral New Agers meet clapboard and cliffs. The Cannabis Medical Resource Center is along the road from Virgil’s Vittles – DIY Dog Biscuits. With a year-round population of not much more than a 1,000 there’s little in the way of bar culture but the Cafe Beaujolais offers fine West Coast bistro food. To get an appetite, go for a walk on the town’s great glory, the wave-lashed headland with its maze of easy trails. A pity the vertiginous path down to the beach has been cordoned off. Hardcore hikers can tackle the 130 mile Mendocino County Coastal Trail, which takes in beautiful State Parks.

Avenue of The Giants

I for one can’t get enough of giant redwood trees. Not content with detouring off the Anderson Valley Road to wander in wonder around Hendy Woods State Park (the greatest coastal redwood concentration is in the 80 acre Big Hendy grove) we fixed our GPS on the unique Avenue of the Giants 130 miles to the north up off the inland Route 101. This is a self-guided auto tour through great sleeping forests, 32 miles in length, but you can just access a section if time is short; I’d recommend the Boiling Grove stretch as best to appreciate examples of the Sequoia sempervivens, average age 400-600 years old, the largest living things on earth. Awesome, dudes, as they say in those parts.

Safari West

I’ve left the most luminous spot till last. Its recent backstory demands pride of place. We stayed, safari glamping style in a tree at this wildlife preserve/conservation centre, nicknamed the ‘Sonoma Serengeti’, a month before the Tubbs Fire, deadliest of the Wine Country conflagrations, ravaged the area. In its path Safari West and its 400 acres, home to giraffes, rhinos, zebras, cheetahs and countless other exotic creatures in the hills above Santa Rosa. On our personal sunset safari, drinking local craft beer on a hilltop surrounded by antelope we’d asked our guide Alex if they had evacuation plans in the event of fire, which he confirmed. Just small talk then after a memorable, eye-opening jeep tour.

Safari West survived the fire thanks to the bravery of owner Peter Lang, who founded the reserve 40 years ago. He and his team saw their own homes go up in flames in the distance, but stayed to fight off the main blaze with fire hoses and a vintage fire engine. All the animals were saved and the park reopened. It is a fascinating place to visit. Check glamping availability and rates here and safari tour rates here.

• To plan your trip of a lifetime go to Visit USA and Visit California. For full tourist information about Sonoma go to Sonoma County and for Mendocino Visit Mendocino County.

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Digest these tasty books on food, booze and travel that inspired me

My wife is aiming for a new Kindle for Christmas. Helping to save trees. While I’m dreaming of a couple of fat tomes to occupy my stocking. Maybe not on the topics this website centres on. I’m not averse to fiction or books on German history. Hint.

Lockdowns saw me researching into some recherché culinary roads less travelled, hence of late I’ve purchased fewer new publications. So don’t expect any definitive overview from the 2021 suggestions below. Still much delight. In compiling my list I realised I had bookended it with two authors who have been with me most of my post-Beano reading life. Let’s salute two octogenarians who are the greatest living exemplars in their field – food scholar Claudia Roden, 85, and travel writer Colin Thubron, 82, both of whose books this year transcended all those feeble potboilers piled high around them. 

Med: A Cookbook by Claudia Roden (Ebury, £28)

On the cover of Roden’s first new book in a decade there’s praise from Yotam Ottolenghi: “To read Claudia is to sit at her table, with everything, simply, as it should be. Pull up a table for the food; stay at the table for the stories.” The author herself begins what is much more than a recipe book with the epigraph “Cooking is the landscape in a saucepan”. All of which neatly sums up the fault line, dotted with hummus, tabbouleh, baba ganoush and a 1001 other treats, that lead from her groundbreaking A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1969) to the post-Millennium dinner parties inspired by her disciple Ottolenghi’s own oeuvre.

The Med reflects the fact that she has never rested on her scholarly laurels. Egyptian-born with Sephardic Jewish roots, Roden tapped into Spain with her last book, arguably my favourite of hers, and her latest offers a distillation of all her magpie-like culinary excavations radiating from the Mediterranean shores. Travel to Gaziantep, a Turkish city on the border with Syria via a green olive, walnut and pomegranate salad or investigate her pumpkin soup with orzo and amaretti, finding a new use for the traditional pasta filling of Mantua in Northern Italy. All this accompanied by evocative, anecdotal detail ranging from early family life in Aleppo via exile to Britain to the contemporary culinary mores of Barcelona.

Ripe Figs: Recipes From The Eastern Mediterranean by Yasmin Khan (Bloomsbury, £26) 

Claudia Roden us a hard act to follow but many cookery writers have mined that rich Mediterranean/Middle Eastern seam. I’ve been a huge fan of Yasmin Khan since her debut, The Saffron Tales (2016), which is as much about charting the lives of contemporary Iranians as their exquisite cuisine. Its successor, Zaytoun, inpected Palestinian food through an acutely political lens as she journeyed through kitchens in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Raised in Birmingham, the child of a Pakistani father and Iranian mother, she initially worked as a human rights activist. This is fully evident again if you look behind the handsomely illustrated pages of her third cookbook. It covers the food of Greece, Turkey and Cyprus with a set mission – to explore how migration has shaped cultures for the better… with food a vital litmus test.

Hence Ripe Figs is filled with the stories and recipes from families that have lived in the region for generations but alongside, in the midst of the global refugee crisis, she finds positive contributions from the displaced in the Moria refugee camp on Lesvos and elsewhere. In Istanbul kitchens she cooks with Kurds and in Northern Cyprus explores the thorny British colonial legacy. Fascinating reportage but the book is also a  trove of sun-filled recipes that celebrate how the joy of food can bring us all together.

Sicilia: A Love Letter to Sicily by Ben Tish (Bloomsbury, £26) 

Food and joy to me are synonymous with Sicily. Well maybe not gagging on spleen sandwiches from the street stalls of Palermo. I’m thinking proper tomatoes, lemons, capers, olive oil, ricotta salata, scaccia bread, cannoli and, of course, seafood. The image fronting this article is of the remarkable gambero rosso red prawns from the island’s South West Coast. These particular specimens were served to me with an orange dressing and thyme, in one of my final meals out before the first lockdown, at Norma in London’s Fitzrovia. This homage to Sicilian cuisine, with an inevitable Arabic influence, was created for the Stafford Collection by Ben Tish. In his matching ‘love letter’ he puts his own light stamp on a culinary melting pot of so many influences. It’s worth buying the book just for the pudding recipes.

An A-Z of Pasta by Rachel Roddy (Fig Tree, £25) 

Subtitled ‘Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes’, this is an alphabetical exploration of the quintessential Italian food from the Rome-based home cook, whose evocative despatches appear in The Guardian every Saturday. Does it supersede my super-stylish long-standing pasta primer, The Geometry of Pasta by Caz Hildebrand and Jacob Kenedy (of Bocca di Lupo fame)? Neither can do full justice to the full range of Italian pasta shapes, estimated at over 500. She tackles 50, subdivided into six main categories, with 100 accompanying recipes to justify her claim that “pasta shapes are edible hubs of information”. if that sounds daunting just check out the recipes, most of which are eminently accessible. Tagliolini with datterini tomatoes and chanterelles? Or fresh capelli d’angelo with prawns and lemon. Pass the parmigiano, per favore.

To complete my Italian ‘course’ I’d like to recommend the pasta-driven Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci (Fig Tree, £20), but this eagerly anticipated prezzie is still being loaded up at Santa’s Lapland HQ, I’m hoping. There’ll be hell to pay if I’m not tucking into the Big Night star’s comestible memoir amid the messy aftermath of a roast goose dinner.

A Cook’s Book by Nigel Slater (4th Estate, £30)

What’s not to like about chapters entitled ‘Sometimes You Just Want Pie’ or ‘The Stillness of Cheesecake’? Slater’s Observer column readers, he tells us, didn’t want prunes in a chicken and leek pie, so he has left them out for this book of 200 tried and tested recipes, which plays to his strength – a close kinship with his readers. As the title implies, he is a cook, not a chef. As home-based as his near namesake Nigella, he does not share her ease on telly. Still he writes like a cosy angel, drawing you into the foodie diary of his life. Think Alan Bennett with a well-stocked pantry. The Stillness of Cheesecake may read like a riff on Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Soufflés, anyone?) but it offers the homeliest of advice, too, alongside a slavering appreciation of food kept simple. And I quote: “A slice of cheesecake arrives on a small white plate. Cool, calm, silent. A sour whiff of buttermilk, the caramel sweetness of vanilla, Your fork slides through with barely a sigh.

“The sweet, fudgy filling can cloy after a mouthful. This pale and graceful pastry needs a pot of jam or fruit to waken it, and us, from its vanilla-scented slumber. A tart fruit compote will work – gooseberry, plum or apricot – or a little mound of baked rhubarb at its side.”

No space to digress into his discovery in San Sebastian of Basque cheesecake. Never been a huge fan of this over-praised pud, but Slater’s advocacy makes me want to attempt it again.

The Beer Bible by Jeff Alworth, 2nd Edition (Workman, £30, also available in pb)

Beer really is more my thing than cheesecake and the ideal Christmas present for the ale lover in your life has to be this revised version of Alworth’s award-winning magnum opus, first published in 2015. Six years is a long time in the rapidly evolving world of craft beer and the Portland Oregon-based Beervana blogger has been perfectly placed to chart it. Take Manchester’s iconic Cloudwater Brewing – they were just starting out in 2015, fuelled by co-founder Paul Jones’ learning expedition to the American West Coast where Alworth mentored him in the hop-driven scene.

Now Cloudwater merits four pages in this massive, comprehensive work of reference that still has that personal touch in its appreciation of the world’s vast array of beer cultures. Even sake gets a look in this time round. What I particularly like about the book is its even-handedness, giving space to understand how mass market lagers might appeal. Manchester, too, is not just about Cloudwater and Marble (young head brewer Joe Ince makes the index) but traditional family brewers Hydes, Robinsons and JW Lees are also hailed.

Modern British Beer by Matthew Curtis (CAMRA Books, £15.99pb)

Another acclaimed beer writer liked Manchester so much he moved here permanently. Just after publication this autumn I met the LIncoln-raised writer/photographer at the Sadler’s Cat bar in the city centreto discuss its genesis – in a blog born out of a Damascene conversion to beer in Colorado a decade ago. In my interview/review I wrote: “New wave UK beer writers have codified the global beer styles that have been clarified/reinvented across America and then taken up over here. Matthew Curtis goes a step further and charts the creative melting pot of our own mash tuns and barrel ageing projects. Modern British Beer proves we are not just brewing lackeys; our own cask ale traditions remain the envy of the world, our own innovations the equal of anywhere.” 

The Curtis format certainly does the contemporary UK beer scene justice. The book is divided into seven regions with up to 15 breweries from each profiled via a defining beer style. It has already sparked a number of thirst-quenching pilgrimages. Check out this one to Sheffield’s St Mars of the Desert.

Modern British Cider by Gabe Cook (CAMRA Books, £15.99pb

On the surface a companion volume to MMB and, by chance I also spent a fascinating day  in the company of its author. the self-styled ‘Ciderologist’. Not in a bar this time but in the orchards of Dunham Press Cider, a northern outpost of a drink more associated with Somerset and Herefordshire. Later that day, at a tasting at GRUB in Manchester I even encountered a Scottish cider among a remarkable variety of styles.

In my subsequent report I wrote: “Rather than an artisan polemic, Modern British Cider is a careful summation that makes you want to sample all the delights he flags up in ‘The Most influential British Cider Makers Today’ chapter. In particular, to consider the contrasts between West Counties and East Counties, ie. made from tannic bittersweet cider apple varieties on the one hand and from fresher, fruitier dessert and culinary specimens on the other.”

So is all lovely in the orchard? The book is a fine gazetteer of where to find the good stuff but doesn’t fight shy of confronting the challenges for a tipple saddled with tarnished perceptions from the past. And, of course innovative ‘new wave cider’ has its own responsibility to its traditions. My Christmas suggestion – order this book and maybe treat yourself to a fine Pomona or Oliver cider to accompany your turkey or (apple-stuffed) goose.

A Cheesemonger’s Compendium of British and Irish Cheese by Ned Palmer (Profile, £14.99)

Cider, like beer, is a great accompaniment to cheese. And we’re not talking the token Christmas Stilton here. In 2014 Ned Palmer, schooled at Neal’s Yard Dairy, set up the Cheese Tasting Company to proselytise about the golden age of British cheese (it’s now). Two years ago his A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles beguilingly explored the artisan wonders at hand and the doughty makers who provide us with an alternative to the slabs of pap that dominate the supermarket shelves. A rollicking read from Ned but this follow-up is the book to slip in your pocket as you seek out a Baron Bigod or a Stinking Bishop or ask to compare a Montgomery Cheddar with a Keen’s Mature. It codifies, via style (mould-ripened, blue, washed rind, hard etc) 158 native cheeses, one to each page with a drawing and a succinct story and tasting note. Highly recommended. Next move is  find a good cheese shop. I’m lucky enough to have the outstanding Calder Cheesehouse just a 10 minute walk away in our little mill town of Todmorden. They do online, too. Visit this link. There’s still time before Christmas.

Wines of the Rhône by Matt Walls (Infinite Ideas, £30)

Early in 2021 I caught up with last year’s Noble Rot: Wine From Another Galaxy. I’d been reluctant to join Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew on their ebullient adventures since I’d already read some of them in their Noble Rot magazine. They’ve been busy boys this year too, opening a second Noble Rot restaurant, in the old Gay Hussar site in Soho and wine retail website, Shrine to the Vine. In prose, they have their finger on the pulse of the contemporary wine scene, opening up new paths.

Less showy is the Infinite Ideas Classic Wine Library, sparsely illustrated, hugely comprehensive survey of countries or key regions, often written by experts with MW after their name. Matt Walls isn’t a Master of Wine but he is Contributing Editor to Decanter magazine, who uprooted his family to a village outside Avignon fo a couple of years In order to really get under the skin of France’s Rhône region, North and South. The result is a revelatory delight, a reference work full of wise judgements. As up to date as it gets and an inspiration for our Christmas dinner wine offering.

The Amur River by Colin Thubron (Chatto & Windus, £20)

It’s a truism that there is nowhere left on the planet to discover, making it increasingly difficult for travel writers to push the boundaries. Well, veteran explorer Colin Thubron, in his 83rd year, is not one to settle for the ‘we’re all tourists now’ get-out clause. Before reading this – in one transfixed sitting – I couldn’t pin the Amur on the map. Yet it is apparently the 10th longest river on earth, flowing 3,000 miles east from a secret source in the Mongolian mountains to the Tatar Strait. Thubron travels he entire length. What gives the book its tense socio-political edge is that much of the journey follows the highly fortified, much fought-over Russian-Chinese border. 

In his quest to chart how the Russian imperial dream died Thubron’s fortitude is astonishing. Early in the trip traversing fathomless bogs at a frantic trot he falls from his squat, primitive nag and twists his ankle badly. Later he brazens out an arrest by the local police. What transcends any sense of mere derring-do is his grasp of the Amur’s tragic history and, of course, his luminous prose. Witness: “To walk here is to wade through a tide of wildflowers: multicoloured asters, gentians, butter-coloured potentilla, peacock-blue columbines. Over farther slopes, swathes of blown edelweiss make a frosty pallor for miles.”

I’ve followed Thubron from his early books on the Middle East through his eye-opening explorations of Russia and China, but this arguably is his elegiac masterpiece. 

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Long may Grub keep the indie flag flying up on Red Bank

The atmosphere will be eclectic at the upcoming Red Bank Festive Trail, the only slightly off the beaten track antidote to the fake jollity and craven rapacity of Manchester Christmas Markets. As 2021 draws to its uncertain close it has never been more important to support the city’s independents and I can’t think of any more indie stretch than the arches above the ‘Green Quarter’ (but don’t get me started on that nomenclature).

Contributing to the Festive Trail celebrations (Saturday December 4, 12pm-6pm) are The Spärrows, Blackjack Brewery, Beatnikz Republic, Popup Bikes, Base Bar, Runaway Brewery, Chapeltown Picture House, GFFdamian Dance Studio and admirable street food champions GRUB, who are the very definition of grass roots.

I’ve been along for the rollercoaster ride with founders Jason and Juliana Bailey from the start back in 2014 across a variety of pop-ups and venues, with a constantly shifting roster of vendors they have supported and mentored. It’s great to see them in a permanent home  now at the top of Red Bank – its bar, events space and street food garden a beacon of sustainability. 

In a Manchester scene where corporate developers pay lip service to ‘street food’ and ‘artisans’, hosting them for fixed terms to give cool cachet to their building schemes, GRUB is the real deal.

This Saturday afternoon may offer a promenade of brewery tours, live music, dance performances, street food, cinema screenings, fresh produce stalls and a record fair, but such vitality is not a one-off thanks to an eclectic (that word again) calendar of events and fairs GRUB generates. I recently attended a packed wine and cheese matching at their Red Bank HQ featuring Reserve Wines and Chorlton Cheesemongers.

GRUB have led the way in plant-based promotion, so no surprise to see they are hosting a 100 per cent Vegan New Year’s Party.

GRUB’S EXTRA FOR CONTACT

The Baileys’ events company also reaches out across the region in collaborations. Its latest project epitomises their approach. Following their major reopening earlier this year, Contact performing arts venue on Oxford Road has sought to reenergise its catering. 

GRUB have recruited for them a street food chef to watch – Michael Anderson, owner and creator of Tikka Chance On Me. Describing himself as “a gobby Irish Mancunian with a big belly and an even bigger mouth who loves life and lives to eat”, he quit his day job in 2019 and has since been creating ‘Northern’ dishes inspired by Indian ingredients, until recently from an Ardwick base. To match his culinary creations at Contact beers will be local, cocktails from the GRUB team. Opening hours will be 10am-8pm Monday-Friday, 12pm-8pm Saturday.

GRUB, The Red Bank Project, 50 Red Bank, Manchester, M4 4HF. Wednesday-Friday 4pm-10pm, Saturday 12pm-10pm, Sunday 12pm-6pm.

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I finally land on Mars (the brewery) in a fresh, fruitful mission to Sheffield

It has been an epic journey across time and space and I’m understandably nervous when I encounter a scribbled sign at the picket gate into the Brewery of St Mars of the Desert. Private function today? Shut by Covid scare?

Phew. ‘Please don’t let Grimbold the dog out’ with a silhouette of the jet black bundle of fun I get to pat once I step across the ‘Welcome To Mars’ threshold. Fun is a good word, indeed, for everything that greets me inside this colourful cottage of a taproom. My benchmate, who budges up for me, recommends the ‘SMODFEST’ Festbier for its soft maltiness, continental hop character and absence of excess carbonation that can bedevil a lager. 

OK, I’ve made him more eloquent than he was. Yet it is a great introduction to SMOD, who specialise in “hoppy koelship beers, foeder-soured stingos, rustic lagers, deep malty dark beers and Benelux-inspired creations”, according to their website. Koelship? Pronounced cool ship, it’s a long, slender, open top stainless steel vessel akin to those traditional Flemish/Dutch koelschips, originally made of wood, whose high surface-to-mass ratio allows for more efficient cooling of the wort in the brewing process. Won’t go into more detail – this is a nerd-free zone.

It’s the centrepiece of a modest scale brewing operation behind the taproom, where SMOD co-owners Dann Paquette and Martha Simpson-Holley, plus apprentice Scarlet, produce some splendidly niche and nuanced beers in the old industrial district of Attercliffe, surrounded by ranks of contemporary factories/depots.

Not the easiest place to get to, hence my ‘epic journey’ lead-off. On my last adventure in Sheffield my last port of call was meant to be here but my phone charge went dead and no local could guide me, even though I was within a couple of hundred metres. Even this this time, on a trek from a tram halt, I feel rudderless.

Once I arrive, then, I am in no hurry to leave, sampling in turn Clamp Koelship IPA, hazy and hoppy yet like all the beers very clean, Koel It! Jingly Bells, all my Christmases come early with oodles of hops married to a festive fruitiness and, finally, The Battle of Frogs and Mice, Dann and Martha’s ‘tribute to the original craft brewers of Belgium’. Artisan or what?

At 8 per cent, Frogs, a dark special brune, outmuscles the 6.3 per cent Mice, a Flanders golden bitter, but it is also smoother, fruitier and more complex. According to the SMOD beer menu it is “brewed with a recreation of the water profile of West Flanders”. Now that is an attention to detail.

Bizarrely, when the globally influential RateBeer site announced its 10 Best New Breweries in the World 2020, two of the three British breweries named had this Belgian resonance (SMOD and, understandably, Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire) and two had American founders/brewers (SMOD and Suffolk’s Duration, incidentally many of whose ales are farmhouse and saison, too).

Bostonian Dann met North Yorkshire lass Martha across the Pond and the pair ran the acclaimed Pretty Things brewery for eight years before embarking on peripatetic journeys across Asia and Europe. Along the way they fell in love with a smallholding near a village called Saint-Mars-du-Désert in France’s Pays de la Loire region, named after an eighth century hermit. 

Maybe but for the prospect of Brexit they might have set up there; after considering Leeds and Manchester they went for Sheffield and took the monastic moniker with them. After all it was monks who first consolidated the brewing industry.

The pair’s fascinating story is recounted in a Pellicle online magazine piece by Matt Curtis,  ‘Everything in its right place’ and SMOD is a featured brewery in his recently published Modern British Beer (CAMRA Books, £15.99). Read my review here.

It’s not just about the beer, though. The taproom faithful are a civilised lot, Dann and Martha host it all with real warmth and Grimbold is irrepressible.

St Mars had been on my radar since its inception in 2018. My yearning to visit has since become a catalyst for discovering a Sheffield beyond my Richard Hawley and Jarvis Cocker affiliations. This time around I was smitten by the diversity and raw vitality of The Moor Market and found Cutlery Works the most relaxing street food hall I’ve ever visited.

THE MOOR MARKET

Chicken livers, gizzards and hearts are all the same price – 90p a pound. The adjacent pig’s feet are priceless (in a nose to tail photoshoot way). Across the aisle a specialist Persian food stall offers ingredients I’ve only ever read about in Sabrina Ghayour or Yasmin Khan. On one fish stall I encounter a sturdy carp, not seen on most slabs. There is tripe and various intestinal siblings, feathered, ungutted game birds and a whole, skinned rabbit still defrosting I enquire about, to be told “it’s French, farmed, you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for the English, wild, fresh.” I loved all this from the moment I walked into find a fine bottle shop, Beer Central, to welcome me.

The building is less than a decade old, cost £18m and includes 200 market stalls and eight shops. Situated off a pedestrian precinct rammed with every high street name you can think of, what a relief to discover this haven of independent traders, offering an affordable, browsable, diverse alternative to control freak supermarkets. 

Its main northern rival, Leeds Market, benefits from its Victorian monumentality and better dining-in opportunities, but Sheffield’s really is hard to beat. Obviously not in comparison with the great markets of Spain, Barcelona’s Boqueria or Valencia’s Modernista-style Mercado Central. They reflect a whole different food culture. It has been interesting, though, to tick off across the Iberian peninsula the rise of markets morphing into food halls – in Bilbao, Madrid, Seville and notably Lisbon’s waterfront Time Out Market.

CUTLERY WORKS

That Lisbon operation is a showcase for the city’s Michelin-starred chefs. Sheffield’s stand-out food hall is an altogether more modest affair despite its claims to be the North’s largest. Set in a converted cutlery factory, in the post-industrial corridor that stretches out from Kelham Island, Cutlery Works offers 13 different vendors across two floors, ranging from China Red’s Szechuan sizzlers to chocolate counter Bullion and coffee roasters Foundry, taking in Thai, pizza, fried chicken, burgers, sushi and Mexican along the way.

Foundry provide bottomless batch coffee for freelancers taking advantage between 9am and 5pm of designated co-working spaces with plug sockets and 10 per cent food discounts. All very cool and relaxing in my mid-afternoon slot, it lacked the buzz of Manchester’s Mackie Mayor, which I still love – despite my general weariness with the whole food hall experience. 

The Guardian restaurant critic Grace Dent summed it up nicely: “I need to ask a very honest question here: are food halls ever a truly satisfying dining experience? I’ve no doubt they seem so on paper and in the marketing meetings, they’re fantastic for filling old, unloved but historically important spaces and they’re good news for downward-spiralling city centres. Yet in reality they’re noisy, unrelaxing and the food is often patchy, with the occasional gem hidden among the colossal choice of menus.”

That was in last month’s review of the GPO in Liverpool, as the name suggests, a post office repurposed into a food hall. She was unimpressed by Nama, a Japanese small fish plates counter, created by Luke French and Stacey Sherwood-French of Sheffield big hitter Jöro (my restaurant review here), who have also transferred their other new venture Konjö.

The original of this Korean-influenced, fire-based “Robatayaki” Kitchen was my choice at Cutlery Works. It’s the first vendor on the left as you reach the first floor – preferable to the ground floor if only because it boasts the proper craft beer bar, Boozehound.

I spent £30 at Konjö, mainly because I over-ordered in my eagerness (and a desire for ballast ahead of my beer destination). Don’t expect a spin-off from Jöro down the road. There’s no comparable finesse. And yet my combo was hugely enjoyable. A duck bao was basically a take on the old Peking/hoisin sauce stalwart while chilli beef was sticky and punchy. Sides of subtle kimchi and refreshing sesame greens provided perfect balance ahead of my journey  to Mars.

Brewery of Saint Mars of the Desert, 90 Stevenson Rd, Sheffield S9 3XG. The taproom is normally open Fridays and Saturdays 2pm-8pm.

Cutlery Work, 73-101 Neepsend Lane, Neepsend, Sheffield S3 8AT. Open Sunday-Thursday, 10am-10pm; Friday-Saturday 10am-11pm.

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The Python of Penrhos – Terry Jones’ quest for the hoppy grail

There was a time when Hay on Wye was not the gentrified Borders outpost of Bloomsbury and Notting Hill it is today after 30 years of Literature Festivals. When we hung around there a lot in the Seventies it had become the burgeoning ‘Book Town’ with up to 40 bookshops following in the footsteps of ‘King’ Richard Booth, who declared ‘home rule’ from Hay Castle in 1977.

Yet on market days it still felt the fiefdom of rough-hewn farmer folk from the Black Hills, their Welsh lilt heard in both stony chapel and smoky pub. The latter served a decent pint of Draught Bass is you were lucky, but some of the Welsh ales were thinner than sheep’s piss.

We were rescued in that same year,’ 77, by word of a new brewery – Penrhos. Its beers could apparently be found in the Llanthony Priory Hotel 12 miles south of Hay. A daunting quest, though, in our Citroën 2CV. The route is over the Gospel Pass, at 1,800ft the highest in Wales and heart-stopping both for its beauty and its narrow bends. 

They were serving the Penhros Bitter by hand pull in the tiny bar of the hotel next to the ruined 12th century monastic remains. We had negotiated an overnight stay in the turret room. En suite it wasn’t – just a water jug for our ablutions and steep spiral staircases to the pissoir. It was to prove a hazardous schlepp with a torch in the wake of copious samples of the nectar. Honeyed and pure, ‘nectar’ was for once appropriate. 

Next pilgrimage would be to the pioneering microbrewery responsible. It would take us a similar distance north of Hay into the heart of Herefordshire cider country to an organic project scattered with the stardust of Monty Python star Terry Jones’s involvement. A very naughty brewer?

You wonder what has brought on this à la Recherche de Penhros Perdu nostalgia? The sheer serendipity of an obit in Opening Times, one of the best CAMRA regional mags. Part of the reason, when the November/December issue dropped, I turned to the appreciation of Tony Allen first was that my nurse daughter had looked after him in his last days. She liked the man as much as I liked the pale and hoppy beers he crafted at his Phoenix Brewery at Heywood near Rochdale.

Penrhos apparently inspired him to become an independent brewer. He was working for Bass in Runcorn in 1980 when he read an article by Richard Boston, who promoted the resurgence of real ale in his Guardian column as well as editing his own eccentric eco mag, Vole, funded by Jones. The pair had now apparently joined with a certain Martin Griffiths to launch their own tiny brewery. Not the regular occurrence it is today.

Tony was hooked by the Penrhos aim to make a small amount of top quality beer. So he persuaded them to let him travel down on his four Bass rest days each month to help with the brewing. Indeed he had a hand in the creation of Penrhos Porter, reviving a dark beer style that had almost died out.

Penrhos Court its last legs in 1971 when Griffiths paid just £5,000 for the near derelict 15th century manor house at Lyonshall near Kington and embarked on a Sisyphean 30 year restoration project.There was still a mountain of work ahead when we visited to sample the beer and eat at the organic restaurant, the first to be Soil Association accredited, created by his wife, nutritional crusader Daphne Lambert. I still have her inspirational 2001 cookbook, Little Red Gooseberries based on what she taught in her cookery school.

We were familiar with the area, drawn by the traditional cider revivalism of the late Ivor Dunkerton along the road in Pembridge. The Cider Barn there is in the safe hands of the next Dunkerton generation; Griffiths and Lambert have been gone from Penrhos a decade and it is now a luxurious holiday home complex with an attractive cafe. 

A far cry, though, from its maverick heyday when it hosted the likes of Led Zeppelin, Queen (they rehearsed a soon-to-be-recorded Bohemian Rhapsody there) and Mike ‘Tubular Bells’ Oldfield, who lived six miles away on Hergest Ridge. Al Gore visited too. All must have been smitten by the glorious banqueting hall with a minstrel’s gallery and crux beams.

Less spectacular was the cattle byre that serial brewery builder Peter Austin converted into the Penrhos brewery. He had been enlisted by Griffiths, Jones and Boston and out of it flowed a trio of impressive cask beers, made with British malt and local hops. I recall Penrhos Bitter (OG 1042) , Jones’s First Brew and Penrhos Porter (both OG 1050) as beers ahead of their time. We even lugged a wooden firkin home for one Christmas, insouciantly forgetting it would be a 300 mile round trip to return the ‘empty’.

Launched in 1977, the brewery formed just one chapter in a remarkable 30 year epoch for Penrhos; it shut in 1983, the year the Pythons released The Meaning of Life with Jones creating the ultimate glutton/food critic, Mr Creosote. Beer continued to play an important part in Terry Jones’ life (which ended sadly in 2020). 

In 2003 he contributed a piece to the 30th edition of CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide. It was titled My Love Affair With Beer and confirmed: “Beer, for me, is more than something I like drinking. It’s a litmus of civilisation. If the society is making good beer, then it’s a healthy society… Real ale is a civilised drink. Keg beer is a dead parrot.”

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Beery bollekes and a buxom helping of Rubens in Flemish capital of cool Antwerp

Fashion and diamonds, waffles and ales – Antwerp’s a heady mix even before its surreal side creeps up on you. And it will. Just let it. Rubens and Bruegel, the gabled Grote Markt and the soaring Flemish Gothic cathedral offer you art and architecture with a Capital A, but don’t neglect the hard-nosed quirkiness that also stalks this town, so perfect for an offbeat weekend break.

Step into the Chocolate Line workshop of self-styled “Shok-o-llatier” Dominique Persoone and ask for one of his chocolate shooters, which catapult finely ground dust of of exotically flavoured cocoa up your nose. No sniggers when you learn they were first commissioned by the wives of Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts for a surprise birthday party for their Rolling Stone husbands.

“Instead of putting chocolate on the dish, because they were the rock ‘n’ roll grandpas, we thought they should sniff the chocolate and to get a good result we designed a machine for that,” says maverick Dominique. “We just made one for that party, but then everybody talked about it in the newspapers, so then we had to make it commercial because everybody was asking for it.”

My companion took the full whoosh of a ginger flavoured shooter, while I suffered the lingering torment of sucking on a wasabi suffused truffle. Heston Blumenthal is a fan. I can see why.

The Paris-trained chef with a “chocolate is rock and roll” tattoo on his right bicep, set up hisfirst shop in his native Bruges; the Antwerp offshoot, utilising the finest South American source materials, is inside the splendid 18th century mansion called the Palais op de Meir (Meir is the main shopping drag between the imposing, gilt-encrusted Centraal Station and the Old Town).

The Palais once belonged to Napoleon, so our Flemish Willy Wonka created a chocolate in homage in the shape of a bicorne hat, filled with marzipan, cherry liquor and bitter banana cream. Look out for poodles and frogs crafted out of the finest cacao.

A sweet alternative is the waffle and doyen of these in a city that likes to snack is Désiré De Lille on Schrijnwerkerstraat (easier to pronounce than spell, it means Blacksmith Street). Desire’s HQ has a decided 1930s feel about it. Pass through to the glass pergola at the back where carp-teeming pools give it a lightly oriental garden feel. Decidedly not light are the alternatives to waffles and doughnuts – smoutebollen, or deep-fried lard balls. Good ballast, as they say.

Just the thing before running the considerable gamut of celebrated Belgian beer styles – immensely drinkable, deceptively strong Duval, various Trappiste ales such as Westmalle, Orval and Chimay and the sour, challenging Geuzes and Lambics, their grip sometimes softened by fruit in variants such as Kriek (cherry).

Step into the kitschfest that is Het Elfde Gebod, self-styled ‘The Holy Place’ on Torfbrug, more a shrine to monkish merriment than your average beer bar, and order the local De Koninck. “Ah, you want a bolleke,” the waitress tells you. That’s the local globe-shaped glass it comes in. That’s what you ask for here and in more classic “brown” long bars like Cafe Den Engel, centre of the Antwerp convivial universe with a view across the Grote Markt of the 400ft lacy spire of the Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal (Our Lady’s Cathedral).

This light-filled Gothic leviathan houses the pinnacle of resident genius Rubens’ devotional works, but before you make the pilgrimage across the cobbles to worship the sublime Descent from The Cross, central panel of a tryptich. and three other masterpieces, stop off at the statue of Brabo in front of the town hall (Stadhuis)  

Brabo? Verdigris coated nude chucking a severed hand, like some deranged baseball pitcher shedding his mitt. Symbol of the city. Antwerp translates as hand throwing in Dutch. Legend has a giant (or heavily-built entrepreneur) called Druon Antigon who lopped off the hand of any sailor unable or unwilling to pay the toll to sail on the River Scheldt. he was finally defeated and has his own hand detached by the Roman soldier Silvious Brabo, who then became the Duke of Brabant.

The hand symbol is all over a riverside museum opened a decade ago to explore the city’s past, ethnography  and many big issues (Life and Death anyone?). Oh and check out the luminously disorienting Matrix room! Yes we’re back with quirky. The MAS, (Museum aan de Stroom) is a striking building resembling a pile of rusty red horizontal box files.

Offering panoramic views of the city, it is the centrepiece of the Het Eilandje district, regenerating the old docks, Bonapartedok and Willemdok, which also hosts the Red Star Line Museum, tracing the exodus of 2 million emigrants across the Atlantic on the company’s steamers. 

Classy eating options are already in place. The dockside Het Pomphuis was completed in 1920 as one of the largest pumping stations in Europe. All this industrial heritage is the backdrop to the restaurant’s culinary aspirations.

After the Cathedral, a craving for art having overtaken one for waffles and a swift bolleke, I’d recommend visiting the much-restored Rubenshuis. It’s not crammed with his works (though don’t miss a fascinating self-portrait of 1630), but it is an atmospheric introduction to a hugely successful as well as great artist, who spent much of his life in Antwerp.

A generation before, Pieter Bruegel the Elder also spent a period living in the city. His Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) from 1562 is a nightmarish Hieronymous Bosch like allegory depicting a peasant who leads an army of women to pillage Hell. It was discovered at an auction in 1897 and bought for a minimal sum by a young collector called Fritz Mayer van den Bergh. Four years later he was dead and his mother built a gallery in his name to house Meg and the rest of his 1,000 artworks, mostly from the Northern Renaissance. Just south of the Grote Markt on Lange Gasthuisstraat, it is a gem of a place. I had it to myself visiting the city’s Sunday street markets.

Not far away, in the Vrijdagmarkt square, is the Plantin-Moretus Museum, a well-preserved building, which in the 16th century housed 22 printing presses and was a magnet for dissident intellectuals. Alongside old presses, the museum contains many printed treasures including Mercator maps and a Gothenburg bible. Afterwards, just wander alleys that have remained from medieval times to get a feel for the city of Rubens, Bruegel and printer Plantin.

I’d like to say I got round to exploring the Diamond Quarter (it’s superficially drab and was closed for the weekend) and the Fashion Quarter – I kept discovering fashionable new beers and genevers (gins) instead – but I am assured Antwerp is a place to come for affordability and individual chic. The Tourism Information folk can supply an Antwerp fashion map, if you feel the style urge.

There’s so much to occupy your entire weekend without leaving the Old Town, but we did venture, via Tram Route 8 from Groenplaats, to the increasingly trendy South Side of the city. We gawped at the spiky Law Courts complex designed by Richard Rogers before visiting the old De Koninck brewery for a final bolleke of the visit (and much Duvel and Kriek, too) in a cheese matching event organised by the best cheese affineur (maturer) in town and in Europe according the Wall Street Journal  – Van Tricht. Their cheese shop in Fruithoflaan is well worth a visit… but even a few nibbles do raise a thirst. Cheers! Santé! Or as they say in Flemish: Op uw gezondheid!

ANTWERP CITY CARD

This is essential for exploring the city thoroughly. It costs 37 euros for 48 hours and gives you free entry to all Antwerp museums and monumental churches, including the Cathedral of Our Lady, a free printed map guide, a discount of at least 25 per cent on tourist attractions, sightseeing and bike rentals plus special offers on typical Antwerp and Belgian products, such as chocolate.

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Heuvelland to Norland – imperial porter meets kabucha gnocchi at the Moorcock

It’s a 30 mile meander across the West Flanders fields from Dranouter in Heuvelland to Dottignies in French-speaking Wallonia. You’re always just in Belgium but aware that this is border country, in the hinterland of France’s fifth largest city, Lille. On a squally Saturday afternoon up on the Pennine Moors there’s a decided gustatory ley line connecting us to both these distant municipalities.

It’s all about food rooted in the Tyke terroir but with an undertow of new wave Belgian influences forging a bond with a powerful dark beer that similarly reflects the zest of a groundbreaking generation in that country.

In the bar of the Moorcock Inn at Norland there’s a well-thumbed copy of Kobe Desramaults’ eponymous cookbook. Moorcock co-owner Alisdair Brooke-Taylor was Kobe’s right hand man at his Michelin-starred In de Wulf at Dranouter, in a region poignantly dotted with Great War cemeteries.

When In de Wulf closed in 2105 Al and his sommelier partner, Aimee Tufford, brought back to the UK – among much else – an affinity with Belgian beer. That’s why if you look beyond hand pulls dispensing Yorkshire cask ales from Timothy Taylor and Vocation you’ll find a bottled beer list of dubbels and trippels, saisons, geuzes and lambics. Even different ages of Orval, if you’re lucky.

The Brouwerij De Ranke XX is on of my go-to beers in my quest for a true bitter finish. The hop freaks of contemporary Belgian brewing Nino Bacelle and Guido Devos have been brewing this 6.2 per cent pale ale since 1996. Unfiltered, unpasteurised, using only whole hops, not pellets. The only compromise is in the address. Dottignies, site of the brewery they built in 2004, is in Wallonia but the De Ranke official HQ is a mile or two away in Flemish territory.

• Listen to a Belgiansmaak podcast interview with De Ranke co-founder Nino Bacelle.

The XX is not on the Moorcock beer list but, to our surprise, there’s a limited edition 750ml sharing bottle of a De Ranke Back To Black, originally brewed for the 10th anniversary of another forward-thinking Belgian brewery, lambic specialists Moeder. Remarkable value at £16, it is billed as an imperial porter and it pours almost black. Brewed with seven different malts and aged in barrel for nine months, it is as complex as you’d expect, with a nose of oak (obviously), dark chocolate and figs/raisins, yet its smooth cherryish taste combines sourness and bitterness in perfect balance.

 Not quite what you’d expect but a Eureka moment. It is a quite perfect match for the Moorcock menu de jour (as they don’t say in the hills above Sowerby Bridge). When Kobe Desramault moved from farmhouse-based In de Wulf  to open Chambre Séparée in Ghent he took foraging and fire with him to an urban setting. The five-ton smokehouse and industrial-grade grill in the Moorcock car park seems a better fit here. So too, as the website proclaims, “250 acres of productive moorland, providing plenty of plants, berries, mushrooms and game”…. and an onsite organic kitchen garden.

Pick of the dishes off the blackboard were both fish-led. A mackerel tartare with preserved chestnuts and radish (£8), a combo I’ve never encountered before, tasted as distinctive as it looked – autumn on a plate, while the under-rated grey mullet becomes a star in treatment Al calls a ‘bouillabaisse’ that is a remove from the Provencal stereotype. Chunks of the line-caught fish are cooked en papillote with fennel and preserved lemon, both of which scent it marvellously. At £18 it is the second most expensive dish on a menu that usually contains only a couple of meat ‘mains’ these days. My companion is a vegetarian/pescatarian, so we veered in that direction.

The porter had a particular affinity with wood-roast kabucha (Japanese) pumpkin gnocchi (£13.50), strewn with a walnut pesto and curls of house ricotta. Not the prettiest dish and as substantial as it sounds, it felt a proper antidote to the inclemency of the weather.

Perhaps we were being greedy ordering the crispy smoked potatoes that are a Moorcock constant as well as a confit Jerusalem artichokes, wood-roast mushrooms in another intriguing marriage with laverbread and miso-pickled beans. I’m not quite sure this gelled, but then where else for miles around would you find any chef as consistently inventive. The drinks list put together by Aimee is equally special. 

Do make the trip up. On foot’s best for the sheer adventure. But definitely choose the right day! Captain Smidge (below) was the very definition of ‘wet dog’.

Moorcock Inn, Moor Bottom Lane, Norland, Sowerby Bridge HX6 3RP. 01422 832103.

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Why I came in from the cold – revisiting my old haunt Berlin

It’s nigh on 40 years since the BBC televised their adaptation of John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People, culmination of his trilogy about spymaster George Smiley, the squat, bespectacled antidote to the crass, cartoonish antics of James Bond. I’m all for compulsive  slow burners, so I read the 1979 novel again recently before catching up with Alec Guinness as Smiley on Amazon Prime.

Le Carré, who died last December, had made Berlin his personal literary territory through 1963’sThe Spy Who Came In From The Cold, made into a movie with Richard Burton two years later. Somewhere in between the two books (and before a certain David Bowie) I lived in West Berlin and can never forget how I survived a sub-Arctic initiation, living in a Turkish quarter not far from the Wall, scene of both books’ denouements.…

It was a bitter January. I always call it my pea soup month. Each evening after work at the Bilka supermarket I stood shivering at the Imbiss at Zoo Station to eat my thick Erbsensuppe – mushy pea puree by any other name. 

At weekends I treated myself to a sausage in it. I was the ultimate, penniless student in my puckering mock leather greatcoat and threadbare loon pants. The only thing I had in abundance was hair.

Finally, come February I got paid and was able to vary my diet to Currywurst with potato salad and even get to see some of the amazing city, an island of Capitalism stranded in the middle of Red East Germany – remaining so until the Wall came down in 1989 and Deutschland was reunified, the Brandenburg Gate serving as its symbolic centrepiece.

After only fleeting visits since and I’m back in the reunited capital a tourist not cultural squatter. Currywurst is now as much a Berlin icon as David Bowie, but pea soup has bitten the dust in favour of burgers and, of course, the doner kebab, created in the city by Turkish immigrant Kadir Nurman in the early Seventies (as with Bowie, we never met).

It’s a city utterly changed, obviously for the better, the axis for citizen and tourist alike shifting back to the original centre in East Berlin. There the Prussians built vast museums and monuments to their warrior culture, but I suspect the urban cool hang-outs in districts such as Prenzlauer Berg, Kreuzberg, Neukölln and even raw Friedrichshain are more the magnet for today’s weekenders. 

Still there’s no escaping the huge burden of history borne by Berlin – the legacy of Nazism, Communism and the city’s perennial brand of Hedonism, all to come to terms with. It   makes for a thought-provoking cocktail of impressions. 

Where to start? For me it was on top of a car park in Neukölln. Klunkerkranich is a place to get your bearings, but first be prepared to negotiate five floors of shopping mall and a couple of concrete ramps. Your reward a ramshackle boho bar (no food), a sun trap with a wonderful view across the city (main image). 

Two Weissbiers later and I felt like a native, though these were cloudy, refreshing Bavarian wheat beers; the real native Berliner Weisse is rather tart, neutral stuff perked up with a Schusse (shot) of raspberry or (shockingly green) woodruff syrup. Like Currywurst, really just a one-off must.

For old times’ sake, I drank one in the Prater on Kastanienallee, a true old-fashioned, tree-shaded beer garden, open seasonally, surviving up among the baristas and sushi meisters of hip Prenzlauerberg.

For the most spectacular view of the sprawling metroplis trek up to the top of a DDR relic – the Fernsehturm (telly tower). You can sip suitably retro cocktails in the panoramic bar 365 metres above the ground and imagine the Stasi are stalking you. In its shadow is another institution peddling a Teutonic image at odds with contemporary Berlin. The Alexanderplatz branch of Munich’s famous Hofbräuhauswill satisfy your craving forSchweinebraten, dumplings and the like.

You are now in Mitte, catch-all designation for the city’s core, which I kept gravitating back to (but not Alexanderplatz itself, concrete ‘dead’ centre). Much more human in scale and with better shopping, the Hackesche Höfe is a series of eight inter-connected Art Nouveau courtyards with elaborate ceramic facades off Rosenthalerstrasse, mixing shops, bars, theatre and creative studios. Neglected during the GDR era, it symbolises the rebirth of the whole Mitte, where thoroughfares such as Torstrasse, Linienstrasse, Tucholskystrasse and Auguststrasse are packed with interesting indie restaurants and bars. 

On Torstrasse, I’d recommend tiny Noto, with its laid-back contemporary take on German food, but even better in the same vein on Linienstrasse, Das Lokal, where an old corner Kneipe (bar) has been transformed into one of the best affordable, casual dining spots in the city. They squeezed me in at the counter and I munched on a blanquette of rose veal and drank a limpid Rheinpfalz Pinot Noir. Then I went back another night for venison.

Even more casual was Berlin’s take on street food, at Birgit and Bier, a hippyish beer garden, just south of the River Spree, that makes Klunkerkranich look smooth. I like this Turkish cafe heavy corner of Kreuzberg, where the spirit of alternative Berlin lingers on. Promenade along the river westwards beyond Schlesisches Tor and you’ll find wonderful street markets.

Or step in off the wide, breezy space that is Warschauerstrasse and enjoy the achingly cool public space of the Michelberger Hotel in the company of one of Berlin’s new wave craft beers from Brewbaker. For those of you that have missed the city’s club scene, it’s only a 10 minute walk from Berghain, which finally reopened at the start of October, the former power station having been repurposed as an art space during the Pandemic.

By all means visit the big sights, the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie, but weekends away should also be about this kind of aimless sauntering, keeping your eyes open. The Germans have a verb for it: to ‘Bummel’. 

So, if you’re in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s equivalent of Central Park complete with an obligatory nude sunbathing patch, grab a beer and pizza and hire a boat at the lakeside Cafe am Neuen See.  Finally, for the ultimate drift through this fascinating metropolis let the stern take the strain – go on a river cruise. Boarding near the medieval Marienkirche, famous for its ethereal ‘Dance of Death’ fresco, I took the basic 23 euros one hour tour from Stern & Kreis. We glided serenely past the bombastic hulk of the Cathedral, the monumental Museum Island and on to the modern riverside resurgence beyond the Reichstag. It would give a fascinating over-view for a first time visitor. Oh yes, and there is a Himmel; they serve beer on board.

Make this your Berlin Bucket List

There’s so much to see, don’t try to cram too much into your stay. I’m saving sunbathing out at the Wannsee lake and a visit to the Stasi (East German secret police) Museum until next time. Here, though, are a few musts…

The Holocaust Memorial

Between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, its design is inspired by Prague’s amazing Jewish Graveyard with its dense, cluttered gravestones. Here in Berlin 2,700 square, dark grey pillars of varying heights are scattered across the site. In the middle of the engulfing maze I was overcome by an immense feeling of isolation and despair, which is the appropriate response to a space designed to commemorate the exterminated Jews of Europe.

The Jewish Museum

Celebrating its 20th anniversary, this Daniel Libeskind building in Kreuzberg bears obvious architectural resemblances to his later project, the Imperial War Museum North at Salford Quays. Step back from its zinc facade and the great zigzag slashes rearrange themselves into a dislocated Star of David. Three long, intersecting corridors – ‘axes’ of exile, holocaust and continuity – showcase small artefacts, mementos, testimonies, but the centrepiece is the Holocaust Tower. This is a vertiginous, walled void, completely dark but for a small slit high up, allowing light and noises from outside. Small batches of visitors are filtered in at a time and the huge door swings behind you. Flesh-creeping.

Topographie des Terrors

On the central site of the Gestapo and SS HQs, this exhibition space offers a comprehensive account of the rise of Nazism. Outside, set against a remaining fragment of the Berlin Wall, is an essential open air presentation of life in Berlin from 1933-45.

Gedenkstatte Berliner Mauer

Immediately upon reunification, the city bought a stretch of the Berlin Wall on Bernauerstrasse to keep as a memorial of the fortified dividing line that was suddenly imposed upon the city by the East German regime in 1961. The visitor centre charts how families were separated on that fateful day. Elsewhere across the city are preserved segments of the Wall. Within an easy canalside walk of my hotel near the Hauptbahnhof is the Invalidenhof, a 19th century graveyard poignantly preserved by being in the ‘death strip’. Here it was in 1962 that West German police shot dead an East German border guard to rescue a 15-year-old boy who was in the process of escaping.

Museum Island

Five great museums cluster on the site of the original Berlin river island settlement, now a Unesco World Heritage Site. You could spend an entire week exploring the collections. Pick one? Perhaps the Pergamon built over a century ago in the style of a Babylonian temple to house the treasures German archaeologists were plundering across the globe. Stand-outs are the ancient Pergamon altar itself unearthed in eastern Turkey and the reconstruction of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate with its eerily preserved deep blue bricks and and sculpted mythical beasts. If all this monumentalism leaves you cold slip into the nearby Alte Nationalgalerie, whose collection of predominantly 19th century art boasts some wonderful Romantic landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich.

Fact file 

Neil Sowerby stayed at Motel One Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Invalidenstrasse 54, 10557 Berlin, +49 30 36410050. It’s across from the transport hub of the central station. 

For full tourism information go to the Visit Berlin site and to book a Berlin Welcome Card, official tourist ticket giving access to public transport and many attractions plus 200 discount offers go to this link.

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V for Vegan Victory with Vietnam (and the spice roads of S.E. Asia)

Old chestnuts are less an ingredient more a verbal crutch but I can forgive Fergus Henderson for dredging up his riposte to the smugness of plant-based proselytisers: “How do you tell someone is a vegan? Answer: They tell you.”

Nigella Lawson shares the great man’s charm and forthrightness. She has just ruffled a few feathers – if feathers are allowed in the equation – by admitting to a newspaper she “doesn’t see the point” in being vegan after she essayed the lifestyle choice for two weeks.

While loving vegetables and respecting the views of those who eat a plant-based diet, she won’t be giving up meat again any time soon.

In her opinion humans should eat meat as the “have the teeth for meat”, while conceding we all should cut down excessive intake. It was the eggs she missed the most during her trial run. With me it would be the cheese. Have you ever sampled vegan cheese? As unpleasant as many of the meat and fish substitutes flooding the market.

The 61-year old telly icon, whose latest book Cook Eat Repeat is her best since her debut How To Eat, said she is unsure how such a diet can be better for you due to “intensive factory-making”, preferring to eat ‘proper food’.

Proper food? If I were to pay a belated individual visit to Escape to Freight Island, self-styled “axis of incredible food, drink, music and immersive entertainment, hidden in plain sight at Manchester’s Depot Mayfield” the dining option I’d arrow in on would be Baratxuri’s wood-fired oven for a Galician Xuleton steak, grilled by the maestro Joe Botham.

No one’s going to ask him to provide the scran to celebrate World Vegan Day at Freight Island on Tuesday, November 2. That honour goes to their Depot neighbours, Mi & Pho, who will be collaborating with Pomona Island, easily the best beer choice across the venue. This fully vegan food and beer pairing will take place at the Urban Market on Tuesday, November 2 (6.30pm-10pm) and feature six fresh and healthy Vietnamese dishes paired carefully with six beers.

Expect Spring Rolls, Hot & Sour Soup, Steam Bao Bun, Pad Thai Tofu, Vietnamese Curry Tofu, and a surprise dessert to be announced on the day. Drink pairings from Pomona Island include Factotum, a pale ale; Discotheque a Go-Go, a double dry-hopped pale ale with Zappa, Mosaic, Simcoe, Vic Secret; Pomona lager; Stacks of Green Paper, a strawberry and raspberry sour with grains of paradise; and Boogie Chillen’, a double dry-hopped IPA with Citra, Idaho 7, Sorachi Ace and Galaxy. Book here.

Forget Seitan, Quorn and industrial ready meals, this is the kind of food (and beer) that rocks my plant-based boat. Mi & Pho, both here and at their original South Manchester restaurant, offer fish and meat dishes but vegan is an essential component of Vietnamese cuisine… and across the rest of South East Asia. 

It’s no surprise that the latest food and drink residency at the evolving residential ‘neighbourhood’ KAMPUS, just a 10 minute walk from Freight Island, has gone to Altrincham Market favourite, Bánh Vì. Until the end of November, Thursday to Sunday, co-founders Harry Yarwood and Jess King will be serving a vegan version of Vietnam’s benchmark sandwich, the bánh mì, along with other non-meat treats from that country.

Harry? Jess? Am I hearing cries of ‘cultural appropriation’? Rubbish. The baguette that’s the basis of a bánh mì springs from French colonial heritage – further proof that food is a cultural melting pot.

Remember recently when the hateful Mail and Express drummed up a storm in a rice bowl over Manchester-born Pippa Middlehurst, winner of Britain’s Best Home Cook’, daring to write about dumplings and noodles? More sneaky woke bashing on their part. Check out my appreciation of her essential new book.

Which brings us to arguably Britain’s most influential cookery book writer, Jackie Kearney, aka the Hungry Gecko (as Pippa is Pippy Eats). The Masterchef star’s seminal first book, Vegan Street Food (Ryland Peters, £16.99), is one of the most thumbed through on my shelves. Its recipes stem from culinary adventures with her young family across Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India. The initial plan wasn’t for a vegan-centric account. It just evolved that way thanks sheer weight of approachable meat/fish/dairy free recipes.

Only last weekend, buoyed by the presence of two South East Asian grocery stores in Hebden Bridge down the road, I recreated her Hungry Gecko Jackfruit Jungle Curry – a riot of lemongrass, galangal, turmeric root, tamarind, kaffir lime leaves and much more, served with a coconut milk-infused yellow rice. After a spring roll starter

A less complicated dish is Jackie’s Laos-style Roasted Pumpkin, Coconut and Chilli Soup,  a picture of which she has just posted on Facebook. Once of  Chorlton, she is now based in Liguria. I told you the world is a melting pot. If you are fancying a switch to a plant-based diet, or even becoming more flexitarian, start with this. Vegan doesn’t have to mean bland.

Jackie Kearney’s Laos-style Roasted Pumpkin, Coconut & Chilli Soup 

2tbsp vegetable oil; one small pumpkin nor squash, deseeded and cubed; 2-4 large red chillies, trimmed; 1 litre veg stock; 800ml coconut milk; 2tsp salt; 2-3 almond or any vegan cream.

Preheat the oven to 220C (Gas 7). Drizzle the oil onto a baking sheet. Put the pumpkin on the sheet and toss to coat in the oil. Roast for 20-30 minutes until it begins to brown and soften. Put the chillies on the baking sheet for the last 8-10 minutes and roast until they begin to blacken.

Put the stock in a large pan and add one litre of water and the roasted vegetables. Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and add the coconut milk. Return to the boil, then simmer gently for 10 minutes. Using a food processor or stick blender, blend the soup until smooth and creamy. Season with salt to taste. Divide the soup into serving bowls and finish each with a swirl of almond cream.

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Grüße aus Hansaland – how Hamburg expresses its Baltic Zeitgeist

Jonathan Meades pontificating on Expressionist Architecture’s debt to the Gothic. Classic Meades. Against a backdrop exemplifying his polemic – Hamburg’s Chilehaus. Ten storey 1920s office block built on wealth from a South American saltpetre venture; ornate, curved showcase for 4.8 million dark bricks, UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

As Meades proclaims to camera in his 2008 travelogue, Magnetic North: “Expressionism was a variety of Modernism, which didn’t prevail against the rectilinear idiom of the International Style. No, Expressionism didn’t try to break with the past, it embraced it, reworked the practice.”

The two part Magnetic North took the maverick architecture/food critic from the Flanders flatlands to the old weird Baltic states via the independent North German cities that made up the Hanseatic League, mercantile confederation at its peak from the 13th to the 15th centuries. Meades’ verdict: “God’s first attempt at the EU.”

That Hamburg, the Bundesrepublik’s second city and biggest port, is still in thrall to its Hansa past is symbolised by its car number plates – HH (Hansestadt Hamburg) – and by a mindset that finds more in common with Antwerp or Copenhagen than, say, Munich.

Hence the Meades telly odyssey (or is that too Greek a word?). Reacting against the cultural seduction of the Mediterranean South with its sun, wine and olives, he went in search of the North, land of greyness, grain-based drinks and herring, territory pervaded by a dark, scatological, Grimm-like imagination. I am still with the great man on that journey.

So does Hamburg live up to the Baltic billing? Definitely. We are in Deichstrasse after dark. Across the Zollkanal waterway the great brick cliff faces of the Speicherstadt warehouse district are lit up a treat. The spice and carpet trades no longer rule in one of Europe’s most spectacular townscapes, but it still radiates mercantile imperatives. Rather like uncompromising Hamburg itself. Which makes it so refreshing for a weekend break. Real. Out there in the current docks, the giant container ships and cruise liners slide in up the River Elbe.

Deichstrasse was here before all this. This modest little street dates back to the 14th century and some of its lopsided properties are restored 17th century. We are torn between two Hanseatic culinary options. The Kartoffekeller (Potato Cellar) is a restaurant devoted entirely to the spud. From soups and souffles to pancakes and a shot of digestif spirit, all offerings are based on that tuber. Even the staff are clad in potato sacks. Its rival across the road is the Alt Hamburger Aalspeicher (Old Hamburg Eel House), offering eel soup, eel in green sauce, smoked eel… you get the message. Or, if you can wriggle out of eel, it serves that other Baltic favourite, the herring. (Note the latter eating house is ‘temporarily closed, as I write).

We said Nein to both places and resumed our evening Bummel – a lovely German word for sauntering aimlessly. Nothing to do with what goes on down along the Reeperbahn. We’d encountered Hamburg’s red light district in passing mid-afternoon. Perhaps window-framed hookers were flaunting it in broad daylight along notorious Herbertstrasse, closed off by a wall to women and minors. In solidarity with them I chose not to slip in even for a gawp.

Instead, we went for Art, drawn by the great Romantic works of Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge at the Hamburger Kunsthalle but found the gallery glum and difficult to navigate. The main station, the Hauptbahnof, next door was more exciting. Cultural compensation came the same evening with a delightful production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Hamburg Staatsoper – at affordable (subsidised) prices compared with at home. 

Both institutions are in an upmarket quarter close to the two city centre lakes, the Binnenalster and the much larger Aussenalster. Here also is the Ratshaus (city hall), the Venetian-style Alster Arcades and the city’s luxury shopping district. It’s best to look beyond for a cutting edge place to dine. We fell for Vlet (above), with its Slow Food nod to North German culinary traditions and atmospheric warehouse location in Speicherstadt. Vlet is Old High German for “Fleet”, meaning a canal in a coastal city. Our two course set lunch featured dishes such as “beef brisket, oat sauce with a gratin of blue potatoes” or “lamb’s lettuce, marinated bread, liver of Heidschnucke (species of sheep), turnips”.

Still, no visit to Germany is complete without a huge plate of traditional Schweinebraten (roast pork) and cabbage. So when it featured on the menu as a lunchtime special at the Altes Madchen, there was only ever going to be one accompaniment to my pint of IPA. Even if it meant missing out on sandwiches, made with sourdough from this Braugasthaus’s in-house bakery.

For Braugasthaus, read brewery tap. Ratshernn, Hamburg’s own take on craft brewing, is based here and there’s a brilliant global beer boutique alongside the contemporary-styled beer hall, which is a far oompah from the old Hofbrauhaus variety (there is a dull offshoot of the Munich original on the Esplanade in Hamburg City centre).

It’s a trek by underground up to the Altes Madchen, but worth it. Nearby is Hamburg’s own “Northern Quarter”, the Sternschanze, full of interesting, offbeat shopping and bars. Continue south to St Pauli, Hamburg’s graffiti-daubed, libertarian heartland. From here cross the Reeperbahn and you are down on the river.

Early each Sunday morning the dockside Fischmarkt (Fish Market) hosts a huge party – really a continuation of all-night revels. We were there midweek, so missed the action. Still the walk along the riverfront, quite sober, is intoxicating enough, past the 10 floating pontoons of the Landungsbrucken (landing stages) to the three-masted sailing ship, the Rickmer Rickmers, now moored as a nautical museum. 

From here across the river in Speicherstadt the futuristic prow of the Elbephilharmonie concert hall rears up, its crystalline carapace resting on top of an old brick warehouse. The building of this landmark project was fraught with problems. Way behind schedule, Elphi, as the locals call it, finally opened early in 2017.

Stray inland from the Landungsbrucken and you are in the Neustadt (New Town) which, like the Old Town, looks neither particularly new or old. Traditional street corner bar decked out almost like an old wooden ship, the Thamers Stube is the best haunt for a restorative tipple after all that Bummeling. Try a Jever, a raspingly dry local beer speciality.

St Michaelis, five minutes away, is Hamburg’s iconic church, its 433ft high tower dominating the city skyline. You can climb it, but I’d recommend the altogether cheaper ascent at St Petri, the oldest (11th century) and most characterful of the city’s parish churches. It’s on Kreuslerstrasse. The spire is actually the 3ft higher than St Michaelis and the views of the city are awe-inspiring. We puffed our way to the eyrie inside the tip of the spire, feeling pleased with our efforts, to find it occupied by a group of kindergarten toddlers enjoying their packed lunches and not out of breath, like us.

There’s no escaping the sea in this city.  Another must-see that makes you reconsider your whole attitude to the humble brick is the city’s International Maritime Museum, the world’s largest seafaring homage with over 100,000 exhibits – hi-tech stuff as well as model ships – over 10 storeys.

We stayed at the 25 Hours Hafen City hotel, 200 metres away down the Osakaalle, on the edge of the giant building site transforming the “Harbour City” wasteland. Our lodging is part of an acclaimed German boutique chain. This one boasts a seafaring theme – held together with sailors’ yarns: 25 seafarers from around the world tell real-life stories of dangerous voyages, romantic encounters, violent storms and painful farewells. Anecdotal accessories and objects refer to these adventures, which are told in full in each cabin’s logbook.

One wall of the foyer is the side of a container, other nautical materials feature and the corridors are lined with images of unemployed fishermen (disconcertingly these were all English, we were told). It was cool to hang out in 25 Hours’ buzzing bar/kitchen, Heimat, but even cooler to batten down the hatches in our Captain’s Cabin suite.

Water is never far away. On our final morning, we trekked (this is a great walking city) to the larger of the city’s two artificial lakes, the Aussenalster, separated from the Binnenalster by road bridges. There is pedestrian access all round the 1.6 sq km lake, but the western side, mostly parkland paths, is the one to go for. In summer there are boat trips, too. Add the wealth of walking and river cruising along the Elbe and you have a city that breathes a sense of freedom. Perfect for a modern city break… with a large cargo of ‘Hansaland’ history in tow.

Neil Sowerby flew from Manchester to Hamburg with easyJet. He stayed at the 170 ’cabin’ 25 Hours Hafen City, Überseeallee 5, 20457 Hamburg, Germany. Hamburg Tourism information.

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