Munch on a hunch
Tom & Nellie’s in Bedale takes great local produce and makes it sing, writes Jill Turton. Pictures by Simon Hulme.
Back in the early noughties, Karl and Cathy Mason ran a Facebook page sharing the different brands of gin and tonic they sampled on a Friday night. Over time, the page gathered some 10,000 followers and the Masons had a hunch they might be onto something. They reckoned there was room for a different, more distinctive type of gin and set about making it.
In 2013, with no previous gin-making experience, the couple launched Masons Yorkshire Gin with 120 bottles from their little distillery in Bedale. Today they operate from a state-of-the-art unit producing 500,000 bottles of gin and vodka a year with a turnover of £6m.
The success of Masons Gin has not been without drama. In April 2019 one of its stills exploded, causing a fire that destroyed the distillery. It forced the firm to relocate to the more prosaic Leeming
Bar industrial estate where they rebuilt bigger and better with more staff and eight different gins.
Now the Mason are on a new trajectory. With no previous hospitality experience, just another hunch, they have opened a restaurant in Bedale, this in the tailwind of a pandemic and at a time of unprecedented staff shortages. Undaunted, they have pulled together a team and put their faith in head chef Norman McKenzie, late of the Feversham Arms, Helmsley, and the Grand Hotel in York.
For Cathy, Bedale is home. It’s where she was born and grew up and where her grandfather Tom worked as verger for St Gregory’s Church. Tom and his wife Nellie lived next to the church in the verger’s cottage and Cathy has fond memories of visiting them, sitting by the inglenook fireplace eating cauliflower cheese before going off to Brownies.
When the building came up for sale last year, the Masons couldn’t resist. They set about turning the neglected building into the kind of restaurant they would like to eat in. Naturally it was named Tom & Nellie’s. They’ve done a cracking job. The beams remind you that this is a 400-yearold cottage but the
soft lighting, the marble-topped bar, the inglenook painted in gold and the rich velvet chairs in orange, pink, blue and purple, are every bit 21st century.
It is comfortable, relaxed, unshowy, so it was just a little troubling to be given a long, wipe-clean, laminated menu that feels more fast-food joint than cosy, independent. And yet it’s full of good things. Masons cured sea trout with sea buckthorn and Alexanders; goat’s cheese soufflé and east coast fish soup. There are sharing boards of cheese, meat or fish and flatbreads topped with chorizo, fennel and burrata. Then there are steaks with chunky chips and burgers, including a beetroot, fennel and chickpea burger, and it’s all moderately priced with mains between £15 and £18.
Local produce is here too, though not hugely celebrated, rather it’s tucked away in the small print: Wensleydale and Black Sheep rarebit, Ribblesdale
Gouda, Lishman’s of Ilkley air-dried ham. Yorkshire Blue cheese, Black Sheep Bitter, Yorkshire rapeseed oil, Whitby crab.
We dive in with pork crackling and apple sauce. It’s not as salty and juicy as the hit and miss stuff I sometimes produce at home, but this is professional crackling, baked to a teeth-cracking crisp. What it loses in salty homemade character, it gains in being properly crisp.
Yellison Farm’s goat’s cheese soufflé is nicely cheesy and comes with an excellent sharp salad of beetroot, pickled grapes and lamb’s lettuce. A coarse-cut pork terrine, made from the weird-looking woolly Mangalitza pig, is superb; moist, meaty, full of texture and served with Yorkshire chutney and a slice of sourdough.
An individual open filo pie is filled with caramelised cauliflower, baby carrots, broccoli, red and golden beetroot and finished with slices of autumn truffle, your five a day in one dish. It’s much more satisfying than my worthy description, with accurately cooked veg, pureed cauliflower in the base to give it body and plenty of filo crunch.
Crab linguine though is the real winner. This simple rustic dish of crab, parsley, chilli and lemon was made famous by the River Cafe – it’s on the menu still, though at an eye-watering £23, but in Bedale, it’s a more manageable £15. This one is made with crab, lemon and chilli and a couple of wild cards: coriander and Yorkshire rapeseed oil. It’s fully loaded with crab, given a restrained hand with the chilli and, while I’d still opt for parsley and olive oil, this one more than holds its own.
We finish with a textbook white chocolate crème brûlée and blueberries and a dense and nutty apple and acorn cake, served with a deep, dark and fabulous blackcurrant sorbet.
On this showing, the Masons’ hunch, once again, looks well-founded. What more could you ask of a neighbourhood restaurant than good food at affordable prices, a warm welcome and a lovely setting? Tom and Nellie would be proud. ■ Tom & Nellie’s, 7-9 North End, Bedale, DL8 1AF. Tel 01677 425270, email hello@tomandnellies.co.uk, www. tomandnellies.co.uk. Open: Wednesday and Thursday, 10am-9pm, Friday and Saturday, 10am-10pm, Sunday, 12-4pm. Price: dinner for two, including bottle wine and service, £90 approx.