Tag Archive for: Lancashire

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Here’s the catch! How I chose seafood over pies at garlanded Parkers Arms

A flock of dark birds shoots up off Standridge Hill as I hurtle north from Clitheroe to my destination, the newly crowned UK number one gastropub. A conspiracy of ravens? A murder of crows? Far from an ill omen in fulfilling times for the Parkers Arms.

It has already been picked over (in a positive way) by the swooping media in the 12 days since triumphing in the Estrella Top 50 list. If levelling up in any meaningful economic sense is light years away, well all the better to salute a plucky Northern food success story. And the hard-fought 15 year tenure of Stosie Madi, Kathy Smith and Adrian Nolan is the very definition of that.

At least I know my way well to the white-washed inn in the remote hamlet of Newton-by-Bowland. I‘ve booked this Saturday lunchtime treat well before all the ‘four minutes of fame’. Back to omens. I have previous this year with Estrella Damm. For my June birthday I’d booked Yynyshir in February; two weeks later it won its second Michelin star and three days before our arrival it topped the Estrella 50 Best Restaurants list. So don’t call me an albatross around the neck.

Enough ornithology. The main room fire is lit and Captain Smidge the chihuahua and I are ensconced beside it. “That’s lit by the cleaning lady … one of the few tasks we don’t have to do,” Adrian, aka AJ, confides as he pours me a large Viognier. He’s 65 next birthday, a couple of years younger than his sister Kathy. Stosie’s in her fifties. Their energy is remarkable. All three remember the desolate times when punter footfall didn’t match their ambition. Even at the pinnacle they modestly tell me: “We went along to the awards, more than happy not to drop out of the Top 10.” They inched into second last year after a steady climb up the charts.

At the end of the glorious meal to come the trio, good sports, will join Smidge for a photo destined for my chefs’ calendar project ‘Tongues Out for the Chihuahua’. Not quite the accolade of the Top 50 celebrations with their peers but an honour none the less. And a rare chance to greet chef Stosie outside the kitchen, where she is intensely focused. 

Stosie and Kathy at the Awards
Back home joined by Adrian and Smidge

She tells me she had been so delighted I’d resisted ordering a pie. This might seem contrary when the house pies are justly celebrated (proper pastry courtesy of front of house Kathy) but Stosie is keen to demonstrate her considerable range. 

As it happens there’s no way I‘m ordering curried Burholme Farm Mutton with its offal pie in roasted mutton fat pastry, however tempting; my home-made supper later is a mutton dhansak. As for a potato and Lancashire cheese pie, well it fades in its allure when there’s the prospect of a Grilled Whole Cornish Turbot (at a £15 supplement) among the mains on the £45 three course menu.

There’s a whopper turbot in the fish larder, so Stosie offers me the option of a less fiddly tranche off it in a Champagne sauce. I accept. With in-house cured anchovies my chosen starter and the chef sending out ample tasters for me of Whitby crab and charcoal-grilled mackerel I‘m definitely steered towards the sea.

Those anchovies, done boquerones style, weeks in the creation, are sublime. With springy house bread I mop up every drop of parsley flecked olive oil and fork up seasonal blood orange segments.

Smidge shares the bread and my mackerel – Cornish sourced, like the anchovies and turbot. The crab is Whitby and comes pleasantly ungussied up in a brown meat bisque. If this is superior pub grub, the turbot is something else, pearly flesh in a shimmering pool of buttery sauce. I am tempted to stay on for evening service and order a whole one off the grill.

Most of the lunchtime customers around us are  ordering Valrhona chocolate and peanut butter slice for their puds. I stay seasonal with an iced rhubarb parfait, using the proper forced stuff from the legendary Robert Tomlinson of Pudsey. Tough choice, though, with competition from Seville orange marmalade ice cream accompanying Wet Nelly tart – Kathy’s homage to her frugal Lancashire roots.

Business partner Stosie’s own roots are more tangled. Senegalese by birth, of Lebanese heritage, she quit strife-torn Gambia when her daughter was 10. She had already run three well-respected restaurants with Kathy over there. It was quite a leap in 2007 to take over a creaky pub on the edge of the Trough of Bowland. 

Down the road at The Three Fishes in Mitton Nigel Haworth was putting a supplier-led spin on regional food, but he was a prophet in the licensed wilderness. It was hard to imagine the current embarrassment of culinary riches across the region. At no.3 in the Top 50 Gastropubs is the Freemasons at Wiswell, The White Swan at Fence is at no.7, one place behind Michael Wignall’s Angel at Hetton, just across the Yorkshire border.

As I round up the little hound to leave Adrian is bolting the front door. Parkers shuts each day between 3pm and 5.30pm, Thursdays to Saturdays and is open 12pm-4pm on Sunday. The pub accommodates hikers and the like popping by for a pint with Bowland Ales on handpump, but serving food is priority. Acclaim has only increased the pressure there. “We couldn’t survive as an off the beaten track, wet-led boozer, opening most weekdays,” says Adrian. “Without the food we wouldn’t still be here.”

And what food. Better than ever. Flying high.

Parkers Arms, Hall Gate Hill, Newton-In-Bowland, nr Clitheroe BB7 3DY.

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Happy 25th to Paul Heathcote’s landmark Rhubarb & Black Pudding

The last time I ran into Matthew Fort he was with fellow food critic Tom Parker Bowles at Booths Salford Quays flogging an upmarket brand of pork scratchings they were both associated with. They later jumped ship when the actual producers abandoned a core selling point – the use of English pigs. 

Not the high point of Fort’s championing of British food. That would have to be the publication 25 years ago of Rhubarb and Black Pudding (for evocative northern cookbook titles it vies with Crispy Squirrel and Vimto Trifle, in which I admit a vested interest). I hugely enjoyed his foodie romps around Italy on a Vespa, but his account of a year in the Lancashire kitchen of chef Paul Heathcote was equally evocative… and benchmark influential at the time. A real fly on the wall record of an exceptional restaurant’s workings and relationship with suppliers in the unlikeliest of regional settings.

In the preface Fort wrote of the Eureka moment of his first visit to the Longridge Restaurant – to review for The Guardian. “I was immediately transfixed by the style and quality of the food. I was served poached salmon with a courgette flower stuffed with courgette mousse, smoked chicken and broccoli soup, slow-roasted shoulder of lamb braised with an aubergine mousse, and chocolate parfait with honey and oatmeal ice cream (all for £12.75!). Although the influence of French cooking and finesse were uppermost, nevertheless there was English sensibility running through the flavours, the textures, the combination of ingredients.”

The influence of one of Paul’s mentors is obvious. On occasions he had crossed swords with Raymond Blanc while working for him at the Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons but also found inspiration for when he set up his own restaurant. Aged just 29 and with a £200,000 loan he opened in 1990 and within four years had won his own two Michelin stars.

I treasure my copy of Rhubarb & Black Pudding as much as the memories of meals Paul cooked for me over the years. But as 2023 stumbled into life it took an image re-Tweeted by my friend, the food historian Dr Neil Buttery, to tangentially remind me of its distant impact. Ah, rhubarb. There, glowing enticingly crimson in a custom-built ‘forcing’ shed in Pudsey, West Yorkshire, was the first of the new season crop, due to be harvested by candle light in a week’s time.

The social media charting of the coveted stalks’ development is a recent phenomenon, but Twitter poster Robert is the fourth generation Tomlinson to grow forced rhubarb by this traditional method. The plants first spend two years outdoors to harden against frost, then are brought in to a dark, heated habitat, to grow quickly, while straining for light. Once ready, the spears are picked by candlelight because too much light causes photosynthesis, which can halt the growth of the crowns. This process produces a sweeter fruit with a white core – a kind of Rhubarb ‘premier cru’.

It’s estimated only 12 such producers remain across the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’ between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell. Originally the trade benefited from a surplus of cheap heating coal from the local pits.

Paul Heathcote’s rhubarb source has aways been from nearer his Lancashire base in Longridge – via long-time veg and fruit supplier Eddie Homes, who set up a supply chain of raw materials of the quality he required.

“Rhubarb and asparagus were just two items we persuaded local allotment holders to grow for us,” Paul tells me as I catch up with him at Preston North End, another connection that goes back a long way. His Heathcote & Co team have been responsible for match day dining and events since launching in 1997 (with a six year hiatus). His flagship restaurant, eponymous Brasseries and Olive Presses are now all in the past, the Longridge site forlornly on the market, but his corporate catering business maintains the iconic Heathcote brand. 

No looking back for Paul? “Until you told me I hadn’t given it a thought it was a quarter of a century since the book came out. It certainly took longer to do so than we envisaged! It was expected to come out in 1996 or 1997 after first being mooted in 1994. 

“I remember vividly Matthew turning up at what was our makeshift front door – we were having a new kitchen fitted on the other side. He’d got off the train at Preston and, satchel on his back, walked the 14 miles as the crow flies, a lot of it along an old railway track. It was a warm day and he looked knackered.”

Matthew Fort’s personal Lancashire journey had begun long before. The family home for generations was Read Hall, near Padiham, his father (who died when Fort was 12) the MP for Clitheroe. After Eton, the food critic to be studied at Lancaster University, further sowing the seeds of his knowledge of the county’s topography and cuisine. 

The acquaintance was resumed during his exhaustive research for Rhubarb and Black Pudding. Paul agrees with me: “Yes, there was a lot of Matthew in the book, but there have been few better evocations of how a restaurant works. Certainly not a place as off the beaten track as ours.”

A quarter of a century on what still shine vividly are the portraits of the suppliers who Paul cultivated primarily to have the freshest raw materials to hand. “It was not deliberate policy on my part to promote the area’s produce as such. It never occurred to me to put images of my suppliers on the walls. Good products come to you or in some cases you create them. There was so much enthusiasm but it could be a slog at times. In Fleetwood Chris Neve (still an active supplier of fine fish) got it straight away. Reg Johnson down the road recognised what I wanted but it took a bit longer to produce the quality of corn-fed poultry I required. It was frustrating at times, there were failures along the way if I’m honest.”

Still poultry farmers Johnson and Swarbrick never looked back as top-end restaurants across the land coveted their speciality chickens and ducks. And Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese from down the road gained much needed national recognition. 

Black pudding, too, got a serious profile upgrade thanks to Paul. And it was all down to his old friend and Ribble Valley gastro rival, Nigel Haworth, once of Northcote, now back at the Three Fishes, Mitton (where he once dispayed images of his suppliers).

“We were in a team of chefs, who travelled over to Champagne and had to cook for our French equivalents and Nigel challenged me to create something different. So I decided upon my own refined version of black pudding and it was a success – the dish I’m most proud of.

“I used to make black pudding from scratch, using fresh blood in those days, but after BSE came along we had to change to powdered. The texture of the original was different – much creamier.”

It all seems far off now. The last black pudding of PauI’s I tasted was in a main at The Northern, a restaurant Heathcote & Co launched briefly pre-Pandemic inside the town hall complex of his native Bolton. It tasted good but no fine dining aspirations with its mustard grain sauce, mushy peas and triple-cooked chips. Alas, no rhubarb on the menu. Maybe it was the wrong season. Maybe you can be too elegiac.

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Review: Five course Gourmet Menu at Northcote

Last October at home prepping up my Northcote Autumn Gourmet Box I wore the apron that was the legacy of a 2014 Cookery School experience there (I buggered up the Beef Wellington, as I recall). I’ve a soft spot for the place, love the Obsessions festival every January that has brought a global smorgasbord of chefs to this corner of the Ribble Valley and go back further with them than1996 when they won the Michelin star they’ve held ever since.

It’s 38 years since Nigel Haworth and Craig Bancroft were given the chance to turn this Victorian pile into a fine dining mecca with rooms. In the Nineties when Ribble Valley Restaurants were suddenly ‘rock n’ roll’ you were either Haworth or Heathcote (Paul), like being Beatles or Rolling Stones. Well, almost.

Lisa Goodwin-Allen worked her way up to exec chef through the Northcote ranks

Now part of the Stafford Collection luxury portfolio (not a bad thing) Northcote is definitely on the top of its game despite all the constrictions of a pandemic. All helped by the high profile of exec chef Lisa Goodwin-Allen who took on the Great British Menu mantle of her mentor Nigel.

He is doing his own thing these days and, as I write, is about to bring back from the dead The Three Fishes, the groundbreaking regional produce-inspired gastropub he created a few miles up the road at Mitton. Sold on with the rest of the Ribble Valleys Inn Group, it shut in 2019.

Remaining under the new regime, sidekick Craig (ebullient front of house/wine guru) is,  welcoming us this sunlit Thursday lunchtime to sample Lisa’s £95 five-course Spring Gourmet Menu. For lunch you must book it specially. In the evening, as Northcote cuts its cloth to accommodate the current challenges, it’s available either of two sittings, as we await the reintroduction of a la carte.

The revamped terrace gives Northcote fresh options – and it’s a perfect spot for a wedding shot

Encouraging is the buzz a wedding party on the spanking new outdoor terrace. Along with a full house of folk, most of whose own nuptial are decades back, we are consigned to the dining room, which shares the same rural vistas. Hard to credit the busy A59 is only 200 metres away.

The matching wine flight is £53.80. I’m often wary of ceding choice but this is pretty solid, notably two whites – the Abstraction #1 Muscadet Sur Lie from Guerin (with Orkney Scallop) and Redoma Branco from Nierpoort in Portugal’s Douro Valley (Wild Turbot) – and a perfumed Bruno Sourdais Chinon red from the Loire.

Poussin the boat out! Lisa treats the bird to a garlic and allium makeover

The latter was the perfect match for my favourite dish, a Norfolk Poussin. Also known as coquelets, poussins are the baby chickens much cherished by the French. They rarely weigh in above 500g and are perfect for quick grilling. 

My first encounter came courtesy of enterprising online butcher Farmeson and in my home kitchen I followed a recipe from Wild Honey’s Anthony Demetre. This involved spatchcocking – removing the backbone from tail to neck so the bird can be opened out flat – and an overload of garlic and herbs. 

Lisa treats it differently. Garlic featured again, one white blob and a swirl of on-trend black garlic, its long caramelisation imparting a subtle liquorice tone. Hen of the woods mushroom and a baby allium poached in ponzu ramped up the succulence. 

The trim breast and a cute little croquette of leg meat may have lacked the splayed splendour of my effort but they were  delicious testimony to canny UK sourcing. Norfolk poussins are corn-fed and reared ethically for their short lives in Fakenham as an alterntib from importing from France. 

Lisa’s previous course of Wild Turbot feels very spoonable, foamy GBM. It’s another little marvel incorporating clam, cucumber, sea lettuce and dill in a saline-inclusive broth.

Like the whole menu, it sings of the season. I love the sorrel granita that adds a lemony counterpoint to Yorkshire Asparagus (green, from Sand Hutton I’m presuming) and basil gel but also the combo of Isle of White heritage tomato textures that lifts a perfectly seared Orkney scallop.

Amalfi lemon inspired dessert completed a satisfying meal, but could we resist the petits fours?

Admirable restraint, matched to accomplished technique, culminates in a masterly pud celebrating the Amalfi lemon and Limoncello. It’s a work of art that almost convinces me tangy powders and meringue splinters are for me. Still a pretty Michelin-friendly plateful. Which bring us back to the admirable Michelin substitute delivered to us in October 2020 as an alternative to the forbidden delights of restaurant dining.

It was easily the best menu kit we encountered during lockdown. But this recent Northcote visit was proof that nothing can replace the real thing. Especially where washing up by someone else is concerned.

Northcote, Northcote Road, Langho, Blackburn BB6 8BE. 01254 240555. For information on a variety of gourmet breaks visit the website but be warned, plan ahead. They’re full up well into the autumn.

There’s a fascinating interview with Lisa Goodwin-Allen in trade magazine Supper, where she discusses the challenges that have sprung from the pandemic and lockdowns. She also sing the praises of the Norfolk Poussin! Read it here.

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