Van Zeller, Harrogate
www.vanzellerrestaurants.co.uk
The
backstory here is that the chef-patron, Tom van Zeller (a distant
relation of Cristiano van Zeller, the Douro and Port producer), has
returned to his roots after working in many starred places around the
world. Now, almost within spitting distance of Betty's
tearoom,
where he began his career, he has opened the eponymous Van Zeller
restaurant in a quiet semi-pedestrianised side street in Harrogate,
with backing from David Moore of Pied à Terre.
The restaurant has a very nice relaxed yet not too informal atmosphere,
the staff are excellent and the food is pretty darn good too.
I am in love with the wall lights. My one criticism
of the design is that the banquettes are about 3 inches to tall,
putting you in a slightly unsettling feeling of looking down on your
food as if you're a cat about to pounce from tree.
The only problem is the prices, which can feel a bit steep, though
fortunately Harrogate does not seem to be too put off.
Latest
review (Feb 2011):
I had another very good lunch at Van Zeller in Harrogate again today.
I was drawn in by a mention in their newsletter of a 3-course lunch for
£13. Naturally it ends up costing rather more than that,
especially once you insert a couple of courses off the à la
carte.
The £13 lunch is a no-choice menu, which might account for
the remarkably few tables that were having it. Though, for me, it was a
very appealing selection. £13 seemed such a bargain, that it
would be rude not to include another course, taken off the à
la carte. Doing so also got me an amuse, that the one table having just
the set lunch didn't get: indeed they asked the maitre d' what it was
that everyone else but them was getting ...
The amuse was a demitasse of butternut squash velouté with
chives and popped rice. Butternut squash velouté is getting
a bit ubiquitious as an appetiser, as white bean cappucino with truffle
oil was in the 1990s. But it does make a good soup, and this was a
particularly good example, with quite a floral note alongside the
chives, which made me wonder whether there might have a been a touch of
lemongrass in it. I loved the popped rice too: a great texture and a
subtly nutty flavour.
As previously, crusty bread was mad hot from the oven. It's about the
only thing they don't make themselves, and I think it shows, as, while
there's nothing particularly wrong with it, it's a bit ordinary.
Unfortunately the waitress didn't know what the difference was betweeen
the two types of roll other than that one looked larger to her and when
she looked closer one had seeds. Somehow she managed to miss that one
might be white and one brown. This was the only bum note in the
service, which is now overseen by a new French maitre d'hôtel.
The first course on the set lunch was a pair of generously-sized
quenelles of salt cod, which came with some very good
croûtes, blobs of red pepper purée/dressing and
other blobs of, I think, yoghurt. The brandade was nice and light with
well-balanced flavours. Pretty to look at. A nice, light, balanced
dish. One more croûte would have helped balance the brandade
to croûte ratio.
My inserted extra starter came next. £9 bought me a plate of
winter truffles and turnips. That doesn't sound great. But it was an
outstanding dish that genuinely vaut le détour.
Some chopped pink grapefruit is topped with chunks of maple glazed
turnip, then a lapsang souchong epsuma, then a very delicate hazelnut
sablé, all topped off with three generous slices of a winter
truffle that must have been tennis ball sized. Some yellow tomato sauce
blobs added a sweeter fruitiness to counterpoint the grapefruit.
Actually the grapefruit and turnip was a really winning combination on
its own, but taking the whole thing together, it was an absolute
triumph of perfectly balanced flavours, scents and textures. Dish of
the year. (So far. But it's going to be hard to beat.) Vegetarian too.
Back to the set lunch. Pigeon with colcannon, pea shoots and parsnip
crisps. This was quite a plain, simple-looking dish on the plate, and
you can see why the maitre d' had upsold a couple of vegetble side
dishes to the next table. A single, though large pigeon breast was
beautifully cooked and served with a red wine sauce with decent depth.
The colcannon was perfectly seasoned.
Back to the à la carte now. I fancied a bit of cheese, and
£8 didn't sound too bad when you consider the price of
cheese. Five cheeses were served: Golden Cross, a Staffordshire goat,
Brie, Yorkshire blue and powerful Mull Cheddar. All were à
point, the brie and Staffs goats especially so, and all at a proper
serving temperature. I thought the cheese was let down by the
accomanying stack of those cardboardy octagonal oatcakes things. The
home-made chutney that was also on the plate was great, but a bit
powerful, I thought.
The dessert on the menu was a slab of pretty good parkin, sweet and
sticky, served with new season's Yorkshire rhubarb. Not a bad dessert,
and quite an improvement on desserts on previous visits.
A few glasses of wine (an ugni blanc, a primitivo and a pacherenc vic
bilh doux) were all fine, but just basic house wine standard. The ugni
blanc was decent value at just £3.95, though £6.10
for the primitivo was a bit steep. With service (but no coffee
today), the £13 lunch ended up at just shy of £60.
Not that I begrudge a penny of that. This is cooking of a
very high order.
8/10
(February 2011)
Brief report of a meal in August 2010:
Off the table d'hôte menu,
a dish which combined gutsy with modern Michelin-striving technique -
slices of morteau sausage served hot, pickled chanterelles, tiny capers,
pea shoots and a rim of morteau sausage dust (made by freezing it, then
shaving it, then drying it). Lovely dish. Great for them too, with
virtually imperceptible ingredient costs and a price tag of £5.
Crab
salad was two generous quenelles of very fresh white meat with some
other stuff. Nice that it was not bound heavily with mayonnaise - if
indeed there was any mayonnaise at all.
For my main off the TdH
(with £7 supplement) came a huge slab of wild Sea Trout served on a bed
of spring cabbage and with Tadcaster peas (bit underdone, as is often
the case in restaurants, which use it to prove they're fresh) &
broad beans, and a very fresh tasting white wine velouté.
Another
generous portion, this time of rump of spring lamb, came with samphire,
an alarming dollop of red pepper purée, powdered black olives, a very,
very thin crisp potato rosti and a nice jus. Some of the best lamb I've
tasted in a long time, and beautifully cooked. The slick of red pepper
purée look alarming, but worked very well with the lamb, as did the
olive powder, which I think worked better than slices of olives would
have done, as you had all the concentrated flavour without the texture
of olives, which might have been a little odd in the context of the rest
of the dish. The micron-thick rösti was good, large like a large, lacy
potato crisp, made by making as thin a rösti as possible and then baking
it between two heavy baking trays (the way perverts cook bacon).
Once
again, desserts were a bit disappointing compared to what had gone
before. Apricot clafoutis was fine, the batter neither too heavy nor
particularly light, the half an apricot seemed a bit grudging, but the
whole was really lifted by a gorgeous heavily vanilla-laden crème
Chantilly.
Lemon and pine kernel parfait was lemony and had lots of pine kernels, but was served a bit too cold and hard.
Superb espresso with top notch chocolates again.
It's
still a touch pricey (with a bottle of Van Zeller Rosé it was £100 for
two), but for the standard of food and service it's not bad value at
all.
An earlier review (May 2010):
There's a table d'hôte at four courses for £20
(though one
of those courses is an amuse bouche), an à la carte and a
six-course tasting menu for £48 (evening only).
The immediate thing I noticed about the menus is the overlap between
alc and tdh and that one dish at each course of the 3-3-3 tdh carried a
supplement. These three dishes were also on the alc, and the
supplements brought the cost up to the alc price. I guess the
chef sees these three as his signature dishes or something?
But
it just seems wrong to have an £11.50 supplement for a main
course on a £20 menu. If you have all three tdh
dishes
which carry a supplement, you end up paying more in supplements
(£22.50) than for the menu.
For me the tdh could also have been better balanced - there was a
rabbit dish for both starter and main course, and foie gras in two
dishes too.
The waiter brought some bread rolls and had to warn me that they were
very hot. My god they were hot! I could hardly pick them
up. They were so hot and so freshly baked that I think it
spoiled
them a bit, as the interior of the well-risen rolls, seemed largely to
deflate one the roll was broken open.
The amuse bouche was a demi-tasse of asparagus soup that was so hot, it
made the bread seem chilly. Burned my delicate lip it did.
:( After a good few minutes when it had cooled down to a safe
temperature, it revealed itself to be a decent, lightly textured soup,
though served blind, I'd have probably guessed at pea, rather than
asparagus.
But things improved dramatically with the next dish, of
quail.
This was a very pretty plate of roast breast, confit leg and
a
fried egg, served with ham and peas. I'm sure the waiter said
Italian peas, which sounds a bit daft - I should have quizzed him
further. The peas came both gently braised and puréed, and
there
was a generous amount of a gorgeous stock based game sauce, that needed
the fortunately now cooled bread to ensure every last smidge was mopped
up.
Next came a foie gras dish: a very generous tranche of seared foie gras
served with semi dried grapes, pine nuts, wood sorrel and a sultana
puree. The liver was perfectly cooked, and the whole dish was
well nigh perfect, except that the smear of port reduction brushed onto
the plate had fused itself to the hot plate so that really only the
potwasher was going to be able to get it off, and that with some
scrubbing!
For main course. I had a marvellous rabbit dish. There was
the
loin, roasted, really cute, tiny french-trimmed chops, liver and
kidneys. There was one piece of the loin (possibly the true fillet?)
that was a little overdone, but everything else was cooked
perfectly. Alongside the rabbit bits were some carrots,
carrot
puree, a barley risotto and another great sauce enriched with foie gras
butter. Quite possibly the same base sauce as with the quail ... though
despite looking the same, you could just detect the added richness and
flavour of the foie gras. Possibly just a little too much of the barley
in relation to the rabbit, but then they have Yorkshire appetites to
cater for.
Dessert, unfortunately, was a little disappointing. Pistachio cake with
Matkin's strawberries and crème cru. All fine, but
it was
just a small wedge of open textured green sponge, with one strawberry
cut in two and a puddle of what seemed to be crème fraiche.
Nothing wrong with it, but just a bit too unexciting in comparison to
what had gone before.
Very good espresso came with superlative chocolates. The
chocolates come from a London chocolatier, whose name I've forgotten,
but were some of the best I've had in a long time. One had a
lemon filling (I should have inspected it more closely to see if it was
ganache or cream), the other was astoundingly good: salted licorice.
Absolutely ideal as chocolate with coffee. A powerful yet
overwhelming flavour that stopped you in your tracks while the brain
struggled to come to terms with it. Delicious, but you
wouldn't
want more than one.
5/10
(May 2010)
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Last updated: 27 April 2009