If you open a farm shop, or virtual any rural business, these days you need to have a café. When Roaming Roosters opened, they didn't mess around. They opened the Olde Spot Bistro, which is without doubt one of the busiest restaurants I've seen in a long time. Vast numbers are attracted by a no-nonsense menu of local produce, cooked in a straightforward, almost homely manner, but above all - and this is what is particularly notable - cooked with genuine feeling and no little skill.
Roaming Roosters is primarily a butchers, with chickens and pigs reared on-site: if you go to the toilets, at the end of the corridor a (locked) door provides a viewing platform on to the next generation of roast chicken and bacon.
Chicks not yet ready to go outside
As it's owned by livestock farmers, the menu is consequently meat heavy, but with a coy "don't tell the boys next door" fish section and a couple of token vegetarian dishes. The style tends to the homely and familiar, with a bit of a hint of the sort of dishes you last saw at a 1980s dinner party, but none of this is in a bad way.
Our starters included a really rather good prawn cocktail. Prawn cocktail has made something of a comeback in recent years, but generally in an ironic or deconstructed mode. Here it's unashamedly un-deconstructed, and in a large portion, complete with hunks of good bread. My only criticism would be the use of pre-pack butter portions, which (however many of them you're given) always look mean and are a waste of packaging - both things which really seem to be out of synch with the way Roaming Roosters and the Olde Spot Bistro operate. Odd.
Prawn cocktail
Garlic mushrooms are mushrooms baked in a cream sauce, heavily laden with garlic, and Sykes Fell cheese (a Lancashire-style cheese made with sheep's milk). This is serious comfort food and, at the same time, not for the faint-hearted.
Creamy garlic mushrooms
A special of spicy prawns with garlic and chilli was a bit clunky, and wasn't the king prawns we had for some reason assumed it would be. Nothing a competent cook couldn't knock up themselves at home, but very tasty, and it's worth noting the prawns had by no means ended up being overcooked.
spicy prawns
For me, the star of the main courses is the burger, which to my mind is without doubt the best burger I've yet come across in Lancashire. The beef patty itself is good meat and stays nice and juicy whether you order it rare or medium: it's also notably well-seasoned. The burger is topped with a good mature cheddar, the excellent Roaming Roosters bacon (quite simply the best bacon I'm sure I've yet come across) and French fried onions, all in a good bap. Good chips, some very good tomato relish and a bit of good salad round it all off. I'm not sure why they bother with the silly squiggle of balsamic glaze though.
Terrific burger
No problem getting a properly rare burger here
A rib eye steak was a little thin for my tastes, but that's a factor of the size of the original beast and cutting the steaks to a price point. It was, however, very good steak (as you'd expect having a butcher's attached) and cooked exactly as requested.
Rib eye steak
A third main of belly pork was pretty good, but unmemorable enough that not even the photograph can really help fill in the details.
Belly pork, fried I think. Looks like a tomato or red pepper sauce?
There is a brief dessert section on the main menu, but this is supplemented with lots of special desserts on the blackboard. Desserts are very much in comfort food mode too: large, filling, calorific and traditional. The star for me is the really terrific jam roly poly pudding: excellent roly pudding, lots of jam and it all comes in a lake of custard. Satisfied-sigh-inducing stuff.
Jam roly poly
Sherry trifle too was spot on, very traditional and just a little sinful.
Trifle
Bread and butter pudding with a whisky glaze was unfortunately on the heavy side of bread and butter puddings, and we thought the whisky glaze was lost, probably in the re-heating process. It would be best to give it another quick brush with the glaze while it's on the pass: that wouldn't really cost much and would give customers that little gosh-I-can-actually-taste-the-whisky feeling.
Bread & butter pudding with a whisky glaze
Sticky toffee pudding was an exception that didn't thrill. The actual pudding element was just too big a portion in relation to sauce, and in any event wasn't the best we've tasted by far. The sauce had been over-reduced and had set on the plate meaning it wasn't really sauce any longer, just some semi-set butterscotch. (The chef, Karl Reader has since been in touch to say that my photograph isn't their sticky toffee pudding, but is in fact a steamed treacle sponge pudding and syrup. Well, that would explain why it didn't seem such a good sticky toffee, though I think my comment about the size of the piece of pudding in relation to sauce can still stand. Presumably another diner was thinking their treacle pudding tasted more like sticky toffee?)
Fortunately a strawberry shortcake at a more recent, summertime meal, was jolly good, though - to be hyper-critical - it would have done it no harm had the cream been whipped a tiny bit less and maybe sweetened slightly.
Strawberry shortcake
I always enjoy The Olde Spot Bistro. It does not pretend to be anything it's not and does what it does very well indeed. I believe it's still not a year old (my first visit was in November 2012), but is incredibly popular. Both kitchen and front of house perform very well and very efficiently, allowing tables to be turned rapidly and repeatedly to help reduce queueing: I don't think I've ever seen anywhere that has such an amazing throughput of customers. Though you never feel rushed.
The Sparrowhawk, Fence, Lancashire Taste Lancashire Produce Evening with Leagram Organic Dairy 11th July 2012
Disclosure: I attended this evening as the guest of Visit Lancashire, but I have not received any payment, nor even travel expenses for attending or writing this article.
This was the last in the current series of Taste Lancashire evenings, where Lancashire restaurants have been teamed up with a local producer to showcase both the restaurant and the producer. On this occasion the restaurant was the Sparrowhawk in Fence, and the producer was Leagram Organic Dairy of Chipping.
Luke Payne
Interestingly, the Sparrowhawk had, earlier in the year, run a little competition among the kitchen to design a menu for tonight, and the winner was eighteen-year old Junior Chef de Partie, Luke Payne, who became head chef for the evening to deliver his menu. It was perhaps a little unfortunate that he had designed the menu much earlier in the year, and so it was certainly substantial. But there's no denying it was a very creditable performance on the night: congratulations to him and the management of the Sparrowhawk for giving him this opportunity.
The Lancashire Foot is Lancashire's version of the Cornish pasty, once a staple meal for the county's miners. Here it was filled with Leagram's Lancashire and onions into a small starter-sized (phew) pasty. The other tarter, which I had, also featured Leagram's cheese, here in a very tasty, but nicely balanced rarebit topping on a piece of haddock that was just a bit too thin, and got lost between the rarebit topping and the tomatoes. The menu doesn't say, and I forgot to ask, but I hope they were Lancashire tomatoes: Blackpool, Ormskirk, Southport etc. were all centres of marketing gardening in the 20th century, and still produce tomatoes commercially, as does Burney's of Clitheroe (just the other side of Pendle Hill). I thought that if the tomatoes and rocket had been passed through a light dressing, that would have improved the dish a lot, as it was a little dry overall.
Smoked haddock rarebit with tomato salad
Rag pudding is a steamed suet pudding, not unlike spotted dick, often traditionally cooked in a shirt sleeve, and served in either sweet, or (as here) savoury forms. Unfortunately, it was a steamy hot evening and nobody on my table had the rag pudding. On reflection, my gastronomic curiosity should have won the day, rather than the "safe" lamb option, as I suspect it probably wouldn't have been as heavy and hearty a dish as it sounded on first reading the menu.
Rump of lamb with rosemary hash brown, minted pea purée and balsamic jus
This was some very good lamb, nicely cooked, though I thought that it could have been a little better trimmed. The minted pea purée was a delight, and beautifully cut the richness of the lamb and the gravy (which was, thankfully, not overly balsamic). For me, the disappointment was the "hash brown" which didn't really seem to be what I think of as a hash brown, and was if anything closer to a heavy version of the classic pommes dauphine. I didn't pick up much of the rosemary that was supposed to be in the potato either. A bit of work on the potato, and this would be a super dish.
Before dessert, platters of various Leagram cheeses were brought round for tasting.
The
irrepressible Bob Kitching
Leagram Organic Dairy is based in the pretty Ribble Valley village of
Chipping, one of the newest producers of Lancashire cheese.
Leagram are well known both locally and further afield, not just for
their cheese, but also for Bob Kitching's cheesemaking demonstrations
and his cheese waistcoats and ties.
Bob runs the dairy along with his daughter Faye, and it was Faye who
joined us at the Sparrowhawk to talk about the dairy and its products.
Faye
Kitching (apologies for the photo which
makes it look like she's conducting the restaurant in singing the
Cheese Chorus)
Leagram currently make some 28 varieties of cheese. They produce a wide
range of what I call cheese with bits in, a style of cheese which I abhor, but also make
the usual range of creamy, crumbly and tasty traditional Lancashire
cheeses. I had always thought these were essentially the same
cheese at different stages of development, but apparently that's wrong,
and the cultures used are slightly different for the three
styles. My favourite of the traditional Lancashires (though
sold in a less than traditional cone shape) is the 2 year-old tasty,
sold under the name "Bob's Knobs" (or in the slightly prudish Booths
supermarkets as "Volcano"). There is an excellent blue
cheese, made in quite a creamy, Italianate style. But, besides the traditional Lancashires, my
favourite of all the Leagram's cheeses are the really fresh one-day old
curd cheeses (the Ramshackle sheep's milk version was here for
tasting), which are pretty unique. As well as on their own,
with fruit and/or honey, or grilled on a crumpet, or even bruléed as a dessert, they make a superb
British replacement for the queso fresco used in many Mexican dishes. Well worth seeking out.
Both the desserts were unqualified successes. The apple pie was reported to be have just the right hint of spices, and certainly looked the business. The ice-cream, made with Leagram's Lancashire Cheese, had everyone in raptures.
Spiced apple pie with Lancashire cheese ice cream
My rhubarb crème brûlée really couldn't be faulted. Great custard on lightly spiced (ginger?) rhubarb, with the thinnest, most delicate glassy brûlée topping. The two ginger biscuits served on the side were jolly good too. The Sparrowhawk needs to put this on its main menu as soon as possible.
Rhubarb & Custard Crème Brûlée with homemade gingerbread biscuits
Remarkably for such a small place, there are two pub-restaurants in Fence, both with good names for food: The Fence Gate Inn and The Sparrowhawk. Obviously, this wasn't a "normal" meal at The Sparrowhawk, but the atmosphere, service and food all seemed to me a notch above their competition, and I hope to return soon.
