Parmo goes posh
Cafe 21 opening a branch inside York department store Fenwick might not be revolutionary but it’s just the ticket if you like good food, writes Jill Turton.
Cafes within department stores used to be quite a thing. In 1930s Leeds, Woolworths, Marks & Spencer and Marshall & Snelgrove all had cafes offering the likes of ham and eggs and “a plate of tongue”. In my day, school uniform shopping ended with lunch at Matthias Robinson’s or Schofields.
How things have changed. The latest Good Food Guide has 75 Yorkshire entries, none of them in a department store.
No surprise there, but things may be set to change with the arrival of Terry Laybourne’s Cafe 21 in Fenwick’s, York.
Laybourne may not be a household name in Yorkshire, but he’s something of a legend in the North- East. He opened his first restaurant, 21 Queen Street, in 1988 and within three years had gained a Michelin star. He went on to launch a string of restaurants, seven in all, including the Broad Chare, St Vincent’s wine bar and Cafe 21 in the Newcastle branch of
Fenwick’s. He was awarded an MBE for services to the hospitality industry.
Having made a relationship with Fenwick, York was an obvious next step, but with no street presence and in a space tucked away on the first floor, Cafe 21 could be easily bypassed. Don’t walk past because it is really very good.
The space has had a radical refurbishment since Carluccio’s time and it’s fabulous. Less a cafe and more a glamorous restaurant with white leather chairs, starched linens, potted palms and dusky pink banquettes.
The menu is straightforward. They open at 9am with a breakfast Bellini if you are so inclined. There are healthy sounding green juices and a lot of nice things with eggs: poached with smoked salmon and hollandaise or the on-trend eggs with avocado, lime and chilli along with omelettes and soufflés. Afternoon tea looks quite the thing too at £36 for two.
I am here for Sunday lunch, a family party and a birthday celebration. The set menu of three courses for £25 provides a fresh and creamy pea and lettuce soup (declared excellent) and a king prawn cocktail, conventional enough. Generous slices of sweetly tender lamb come with roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding and three veg. Also well recommended is a textbook lemon posset with raspberries or
we could have chosen strawberry jelly and ice cream or spotted dick.
The à la carte, or what they call the “All Day Menu”, covers salads and small plates. One of our party enjoyed the wood-roasted salmon, French beans and pickled cucumber in a yoghurt dressing, and from the “Large Plates”, I chose a Thai green curry with Jasmine rice. It may not pass for authentic in Bangkok’s Khao San Road, but with plenty of chicken and fragranced with lime and lemongrass, coriander and coconut, it passed the test of a very decent Thai curry.
You know the Teesside Parmo, right? It’s flattened breaded chicken with white sauce, topped off with molten orange cheddar. It reached a national audience when Anthony O’Shaughnessy made it on MasterChef and I remember having a
“posh Parmo” at the Cleveland Tontine. There are shades of the posh parmo here in Laybourne’s chicken schnitzel, which is topped with truffle mayonnaise and a fried egg. The price of £16.50 might be pushing it in a Middlesbrough chippy, but with fries and salad it’s satisfying and fair value if you consider the splendid decor, the white linen and an army of waiters.
Service was spot on from an attentive team. A shout out for our waiter, who feigned disapproval at the barman’s mixing of a Negroni sbagliato (that’s a Campari, red vermouth and Prosecco, to you and me) and was eager to replace it with a properly made one, though we insisted it was perfectly fine.
It was good to be lunching with family once more on plates that don’t have to be explained. If Terry Laybourne’s menu is neither radical nor revolutionary it’s not meant to be. He knows his audience. A chef of my acquaintance once told me she cooked food “you don’t have to be in awe of ”. Cafe 21 is not awesome but it’s admirable and I’m very up for that.
■ Cafe 21 in Fenwick’s, Coppergate Centre, York YO1 9WY. 01904
946099, www.cafe21york.co.uk and opentable.co.uk. Open: MondayFriday, 9am-7pm, Saturday, 9am6pm, Sunday, 9am-5pm. Price: threecourse set menu, £25, a la carte, approximately £70 for two.
Ihave bought a hat, tried to lose weight and have a fabulous new pair of shoes that I will wear only until the photos have been taken. Yes, we have a wedding in the family. But after a year’s delay, things are going to be a bit different from the original plans. For a start, the bridesmaids can’t make it. One is in Canada, the other is in Hong Kong, so they will be dressed up in their pretty frocks, standing in their respective gardens, livestreamed into the ceremony. There has also been a last-minute substitution of the Best Man.
And half the groom’s family can’t travel either. There are limits on how many days elderly aunts are prepared to spend in quarantine – and they are coming only from Europe. But joy of joys, the wedding will go ahead under the new freedom rules which we will study carefully to make sure that everything complies. We might even be allowed to dance.
Even though numbers are down, as the groom says, this is the first party their friends will have been to for 18 months, so they want to have a good time, and that means making sure there is enough to drink.
I was delighted to discover that most wine merchants arrange wedding tastings so that the bride and groom can select their wines. The caterer at our venue is linked into the Majestic range, which is fantastic and well-priced, especially when you buy enough for a party.
Armed with the menu, we arranged a tasting but as luck would have it on the day of the tasting the bride was “pinged” by the NHS app and had to spend 10 days in isolation. Our local Majestic store rose to the challenge and the tasting was conducted over Zoom. One advantage in using Majestic is that if you live in Yorkshire but the wedding is in Devon, you can taste locally and the order will be fulfilled by the store nearest to the wedding venue.
The choice of wine is sometimes difficult. It is better if just the bride and groom choose the wines. “Committee decisions by the whole family quite often don’t work,” says Peter Fawcett, of Field & Fawcett in York, which is why he will often pack up a few wines for the bride and groom to taste at home.
Rob Hoult, at Hoults of Huddersfield, agrees. “This will be a very stressful day for the happy couple and they should choose the wines they like. If the top table is happy with the wines, then the rest of the guests are bound to be happy.” He warns against pouring beer at the reception. “There is something about beer that makes all the blokes stand around together, but when they are drinking wine they tend to sit down and talk to everyone.”
How much will people drink? It is guesswork, but Rob finds that many people overestimate the amount that will be needed. It’s that gap between the wedding and the dinner that is the heavy drinking time. “Most people are standing up waiting while photos are taken, and they can’t put their glasses down, so they sip constantly. Once the guests sit down to eat, they slow down.”
Make sure you have plenty of nonalcoholic drinks circulating during the whole event and try not to overpour wine for the most enthusiastic drinkers. We have all been to weddings where the uncle that no-one has seen for decades falls asleep in his chair and snores through the speeches.
The general calculation is between half a bottle and three-quarters of a bottle per