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 Castle Dairy is probably the oldest occupied building in Kendal, dating back to the 14th century. It must, by my reckoning also be one of the oldest restaurants currently operating in Kendal, although not continuously.
The street facade
I remember it in the 1970s, when it was not a new restaurant, run by two women (I was going to say 'old women' but that might just be how I remember them because I was much, much younger at the time) with something of a fearsome reputation.
They are long gone, of course, and between 2007 and 2011 the Castle Dairy's doors were closed and the building fell into disrepair, to the extent that it was included on English Heritage's 'Heritage at Risk' register in 2010.
The Castle Dairy reopened in 2011, having been taken on by the local further education college, Kendal College. It now provides valuable work experience in the kitchen and front of house for Kendal College apprentices; on the evidence of this visit it also provides some very fine food.
Certainly on this visit it does not appear to run like many catering college restaurants, with lecturers supervising students: there was just one person working front of house, and (if she was one of the apprentices) doing her lecturers proud, as she was very good.
The main hall
I dread to think what Kendal College's health & safety people make of this fireplace
Inside it seems pretty much unchanged. As befits such an old building, small corridors link a number of small rooms. There's a lot of old wood, flag floors, and (on this spring day) a fire blazing in an old range.
There are two menus at lunchtime: an à la carte and a "bar menu" (not that there's really a bar area as such).
Bread is, I believe, from Kendal's excellent Staff of Life Bakery: a fabulous elderflower sourdough and a slightly underbaked brown/granary(?) bread were offered. It's great that they're supporting a local small business like Staff of Life, but - particularly for a restaurant related to a catering college - it seemed a bit of a cop out. Or maybe they put apprentices into Staff of Life?
My first course was shown as a special on the menu, though as it's a laser-printed sheet, I'm not sure why there's a need to have a couple of items billed as specials on what's not a long menu.
Poached smoked haddock with a wild garlic and haddock brandade, crispy (i.e. breadcrumbed) quail's egg and Lakeland pancetta. This was early April and a bit too early for wild garlic in Cumbria this year, which struck me as a little odd. But apart from a query over where they'd got wild garlic, there was nothing in the dish to fault. The haddock was perfectly cooked, the quails eggs were spot on, with the yolks still runny, the bright green brandade was ultra smooth, yet retained the full flavour of both the wild garlic and the haddock.
Main course was a lovely pigeon dish.
Pan-seared wood pigeon with liver parfait, cumin-spiced fregola, swiss chard and a carrot purée. Excellent dish again with all the ingredients perfectly cooked and working very harmoniously.
Orange torte with blood orange sorbet
Unfortunately the dessert was a bit of a let down. An orange torte with a blood orange sorbet. The sorbet was beautiful, but the torte was just a bit too technically perfect, like a patisserie student's first torte-by-numbers attempt. It was just a bit heavy for me, not least because it was at least 50% chocolate, which wasn't mentioned on the menu at all. Some orange flavoured whipped cream hadn't quite worked either, having somehow managed to take on the texture of commercial squirty cream.
Very good espresso after.
Upstairs is an art gallery (for the College's art students), but also houses some of the ancient fixtures and fittings, including rather oddly a massive oak 4-poster bed. This must be about the only restaurant in the country with a bed that's not for sleeping in.
I probably go to the Parkers Arms in the tiny Ribble Valley village of Newton-in-Bowland more than I go to any other local pub or restaurant. The beer's good, the welcome and service are good (though occasionally struggle when under pressure on the busiest days). But above all, the food is genuinely and consistently interesting and excellent.
I could fill this blog with reports of meals at the Parkers Arms (follow me on Twitter for blow by blow details in the future), but I thought for once, I'd just present a photograph gallery of images from recent meals in 2013. Everything at the Parkers Arms is homemade (the only exception I can think of is the bacon and gammon which come from the excellent Roaming Roosters near Burnley), so rather than me repeating that in the caption to each photograph, please assume it.
I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed eating the dishes!
Starters
Game terrine with piccallili
Pastrami with treacle bread
Stosie has now got her pastrami spot on, and as for that bread ... well that's almost worth the trip on its own.
The treacle bread
Cheese scone with tomatoes
On this occasion, I'd asked for a small tasting menu, and this cheese scone was the first course out: not something I'd have ordered, but it was jolly good - a very light scone with a nice cheesy flavour
Beautiful buttery squid
Mushroom parfait
Curd cheese with grilled white peaches
Cured salmon with horseradish cream
Wild garlic custard with chicken scratchings
Main courses
Prawns and vegetables grilled on Stosie's new toy, a Primo BBQ.
Squid with extra hammy petits pois à la française
Lamb kofte - beautifully and delicately spiced, excellent hummus, tzatziki and baba ghanoush in the little pots
Beautiful, simple spring lamb
Spicy BBQ baby back ribs. Fab French fried onions too.
Grouse done properly
The grouse liver, kidney and heart
Desserts
Stosie's curd cheese with a variety of gooseberry preparations
Raspberry-vanilla slice
The pasteis de nata (Portuguese custard tarts) are a must if they're on the menu
