The Empire Café, Leeds: ‘Doing the good things’ – restaurant review - The Guardian

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The Empire Café, 6 Fish Street, Leeds LS1 6DB.. Breakfast baps from £4.50, small plates £8-£12, large plates £15-£20, desserts £9, wines from £25

The Empire Café in Leeds has got a whole bunch of angles, and boy are they working them. Happily, they’re good angles, so it’s fine. The story goes like this. Yorkshire chef Sam Pullan, previously of the Bear at Carriages in Knaresborough, took a lease a couple of years back on a corner space just off Briggate in Leeds, formerly called La Strega. With his partner Nicole Deighton he planned to open a café called Appys. In 2020, when renovations began, they pulled back the Strega shopfront to discover a sweeping red and gold sign for the Empire Café, a name that almost certainly references the Empire Theatre, one of the great music halls of Leeds, which opened just a street away in 1898. Further research revealed that this corner of Fish Street had been a dining room since 1884.

Pullan recognised the gift. The Empire Café would be reborn. The eating houses on this site up a tight alley, or ginnel to be Yorkshire-appropriate, had clearly been home to all-day dining for well over a century. Now it would be again. These alleyways had once been a stretch of slaughterhouses and butchers before they all moved into the nearby Kirkgate market. The Empire Café would get as much of its produce from the Kirkgate, for bacon baps served first thing from the hatch, along with mugs of Yorkshire tea the colour of a silted river. There would be flame-roasted walls of rotisserie chickens, with the schmaltz dripping into the roasting potatoes below. There would be steak suppers and cocktails and an awful lot more that would have terrified the locals a century or perhaps just a decade ago.

There really is a hatch straight off the kitchen into the street and it really is doing the good things. I know this because, after our main course, I asked if they could rustle me up a bacon bap even though the breakfast service was long gone. I wanted to see what £5 would get me. The answer is a proper soft bap the size of a side plate, generously filled with crisped rashers of the best thick-cut, smoked, streaky bacon, red and brown sauce optional. The next time I stay in Leeds I’m returning for this, or perhaps the £12 breakfast of steak and eggs with chimichurri and fried potatoes, or the £8 desi chana of spiced chickpeas, tomato, and tamarind to be mopped up with flaky roti.

This is all very caff, albeit fancy caff, though the rest of the Empire presents more as restaurant. It’s dark painted and tidy and at the back are wall banquettes opposite the kitchen, around high tops so high your legs will toddler-dangle. If that’s uncomfortable, head downstairs to the basement dining room, where candlelight flickers even at lunchtime or, if its warm enough, go to the outside tables. The lunch and dinner menus lead with those birds turning slowly on the rotisserie, the skin crisping and browning with each revolution. These are big meaty fowl, as they should be at £29 for the whole chicken, and £17 for a half. But they really are very good, the meat tasting deeply of itself. You are invited to choose “your lather” and “your crumb”. So that’s sauce and seasoning. I go traditional with the garlic, lemon and tarragon sauce and the dry herb mix. It needs a little extra salt, that’s all.

After that, as a sign of the deeper ambitions at play here, the choices open up. There’s gochujang and ginger, jalapeno and lime or miso and soy sauces and you can finish it by pelting the skin with chilli pepper flakes. There’s also a set of small plates at between £8 and £12. The duck éclair, a choux bun filled with whorls of velvety duck liver parfait and painted with a brilliantly red cherry and cognac glaze, looks like an exhibit from an exhibition of food as art at the V&A. There’s an equal precision to a “pinwheel” of celeriac, the vegetable turned into one long ribbon, then spiralled in on itself, roasted until soft, glazed with a calvados caramel and dotted with an armpit-wafting truffle aioli. Though the chickens do turn and the bacon does sizzle, non-meat dishes are clearly not also-rans here. Other small plates include smoked corn on the cob with banana chilli mole, a savoury version of a Portuguese custard tart made with reblochon and, for those wanting something more substantial, a mixed grill of aubergines, sweetcorn, pak choi and mushrooms.

We have cod cheeks crusted in a coconut crumb and deep-fried and served with pickled cucumber and what they call a rendang sauce. Calling a Spam fritter a pakora is, shall we say, an overly enthusiastic use of language, when many of us still have a warm place in our nostalgic 1970s school dinner hearts for the original name. It’s a lovely thing, if it’s the thing you love. The caesar salad served here may not quite warrant the name, but the addition of hot crispy deep-fried vinegared anchovies, or boquerones, is a wizard idea, whatever it’s called.

It’s a mark of somewhere trying to do so much that there are missteps. If you promise chicken schmaltz potatoes, a flirty, lusty trio of food words if ever there was one, I want them golden, and crisp and totally irresistible and these weren’t, not quite. And while the chicken needed just a little more salt, the miso caramel on a hot chocolate pudding boasted far too much. But these are mentioned more out of a desire to be a dutiful reporter, rather than a rancid critic. Because I loved the Empire Café: I loved the enthusiasm of the staff, its attention to the good things, its sweetly comic attachment to location.

Our other dessert is a hot, crisp waffle, topped with a slumping dollop of thick sweetened cream mixed with brown breadcrumbs, maple syrup and, best of all, a “cup of Yorkshire tea” foam. It’s a frothy, spoonable soft peak that tastes exactly like the cup of hot sweet tea you’re given by a stranger after you’ve crashed your car or watched your house burn down and need to get over the shock. Or, to be less catastrophic, it’s dessert as cuddle and it made me smile. Back home from Leeds, where once I was a student, I was digging around their website and came across their email address which is nowthen@empirecafeleeds.co.uk. I was smiling all over again. In God’s own country, God is in the detail.

News bites

The Edinburgh restaurant space of the late Paul Kitching, has a new custodian. Stuart Ralston, chef-owner of Aizle, Noto and Tipo in the Scottish capital, is opening a 28-cover restaurant in what was Kitching’s 21212. Lyla, which opens on 6 October, will offer a £145, 10-course seafood tasting menu. The bedrooms, which are part of the site, will continue to be run by Paul Kitching’s wife, Katie O’Brien.

The London Shell Co, the restaurant housed in a narrowboat moored on the canal at London’s Paddington, is once again raising funds for the Fishermen’s Mission, through a night of oyster fun. A dozen cooks and chefs, including Chris Leach from Manteca, Ed Jennings from Parakeet and Sally Abe from the Pem will be going head-to-head with their oyster creations on 12 September. Tickets, which include glasses of fizz, sausage rolls and more, cost £75 and are available by using the online booking widget for the date at londonshellco.com

Liverpool is now home to a Gravity Max, a food and entertainment venue combining what has been called “competitive socialising” – mini golf, augmented reality bowling, E-Karting – alongside a pretty mainstream food court. The featured outlets include pasta company Coco de Mama, the Athenian which serves gyros, burger chain Wendy’s and dessert bar Creams, alongside various bars. It can accommodate 2,500 people at any one time and is located a couple of hundred metres from Liverpool Lime street station. Find out more here gravity-global.com/max/liverpool

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1

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