22 Oxford Street, Harrogate (01423 202 363). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £100
Sometimes you have no choice but to abandon the cynicism, even when a restaurant is asking for it. And Norse in Harrogate was asking for it. Honestly, its website couldn’t have done more to make me roll my eyes short of connecting electrodes to my ocular muscles. The problem is that while pretentious, mannered restaurant design costs a lot of money, pretentious, mannered website design doesn’t. Find someone with overly grandiose ideas and an approach to the English language which would make only the author of some Game of Thrones fan fiction feel frisky, put them in charge of a mouse and keyboard and, hurrah, you have the Norse website.
They don’t have a barman. They have a “barkeep”, because when it’s 5pm in London it’s 1423AD in Harrogate. Likewise their wine list has a “curator”, presumably there to arrange the bottles into pretty patterns and mark them up using a Dymo LabelWriter. It’s full of lines like “the experience should be one of discovery” and “we offer food to excite and sustain you in equal measure” and “the menu should make you feel torn, every dish a temptation”. It bangs on about Nordic cuisine, which is “about using what you have when it’s at its best and preserving the extra to use later on”.
The implication is that the young head chef, Murray Wilson, a finalist in the first series of MasterChef: The Professionals in 2008, has read more than is strictly good for him about Noma in Copenhagen and the exacting regionalist framework they use for choosing ingredients. He’s clocked that there’s a Viking museum in nearby York and decided to have a crack at the Nordic thing in Harrogate without ever referencing Noma at all. That sound? It’s passing bandwagons being leapt upon. I read stuff like this and I worry: for my sanity, for their ambition, for a night I’ll never get back.
And then I get to the restaurant and all this melts away. It’s not that the website isn’t indescribably silly; it really is. But the restaurant it’s hawking isn’t. Norse occupies what by day is a coffee shop called Baltzersen’s. They serve things like gravadlax, meatballs and cinnamon buns. Then they close for an hour in the early evening and re-open as Norse. It is a space of ragged old varnished wood and looks not unlike a sauna that’s seen better days. I mean that as a compliment. There is no overt Skandi silliness, no animal pelts, or sheep skulls to drink out of. And that applies to the food, too. Norse is a bunch of young blokes – and it is all blokes, with carefully trimmed beards and intense gazes – cooking their hearts out. Not all of it works, but even the misfires are admirable. And some of it is very good indeed.
There is a menu of just seven savouries, priced from £8.95 to the low teens, and two sweet dishes at £6.95. You’re advised to get two or three of each per person; as there are seven of us, we get multiples of everything. They don’t flinch. It begins with still-warm sourdough rolls to be used as a vehicle for whorls of soft salty butter. We are given shots of schnapps flavoured with pecan or hazelnut, lime and coriander or, in a masterstroke, rhubarb and custard, a charming meeting of the grown-up and the infantile. We are brought a bowl of nutty toasted seeds piled high over a stiff foam of cider vinegar and apple. For once the cliché of the foam makes sense. It binds the toastiness together without soaking it and losing the crunch.
A bright, crisp salad of pickled root vegetables is followed by a dish of baby globe artichokes with the funk of Monk’s Folly cheese and a little gooseberry, which makes the vegetables taste intensely of themselves. A perfectly charred piece of stonkingly fresh mackerel more than stands up to beetroot and apple with parsley root purée and a horseradish sauce. A plate of Dover sole fillets comes with mussels, salsify and a burnt cream sauce that has me wondering whether anybody would be shocked if I licked the crockery clean.
Granted, these things read complicated. Few details are left off. There are no surprises on the plate because all of them are listed on the menu. But they are assembled with wit and make total sense. There is bravery in serving slices of best end of Yorkshire lamb with a generous ribbon of pearly fat that has not been fully caramelised. I can imagine wimps pushing it to the side. They would be missing the very essence of the animal. The richness of the fat is cut through by a sticky risotto of wheatberries – a new one on me – and sour onions.
Star billing, however, goes to a loin of hare, the bruiser of the game world, wrapped in crisped smoked bacon, with the leg that’s been long-braised to a dark, gamey heap under a puddle of the lightest mash. Alongside this is an item that looks like a fallen tree from Lord of the Rings. It is a log of thick carrot that had been simmered in duck fat for six hours. This, it turns out, is how to make vegetables meaty. From now on I insist that all my vegetables are simmered in duck fat for six hours. It’s for their own good.
Only one dish really doesn’t work: a porridge of fermented grains with parsnip purée, wild mushrooms and a slow-poached egg. It is as messy and unstructured as it sounds, not least because the water-bathed egg hasn’t fully set and is too much scary translucent white, dribbling across grains which haven’t fermented to a sourness that might have given it all a bit of light and shade. But it falls into the category of “noble failures”.
They make up for it with a narrow strip of killer chocolate ganache alongside marshmallows flavoured with rose so that they taste like Turkish delight. Finally, there is a compôte of damson and gin, which is something I need every morning for my breakfast.
Norse feels like a moment. It feels like the thing these guys are going to do before they go on and do the real thing they’re going to do somewhere else. So book in now. Trust them. Just don’t spend too much time on the website.
Jay’s news bites
■ There’s little in the way of Norse-like boundary pushing at Bristol’s Wallfish Bistro, but it does share that sense of young people cooking their socks off. It’s a neighbourhood place that makes us all wish it was in our neighbourhood. Come for squid crusted in cumin and fennel seeds, roasted lamb on a pokey onion purée, chocolate mousse with salt caramel and a bill that won’t leave you breathless (wallfishbistro.co.uk).
■ A good news/bad news story. Bad news: trudging my way to Leeds station I noticed the marvellous Friends of Ham – the home of great charcuterie and craft beers – is closed. Good news: it should be ready to reopen shortly, having knocked through into the shop next door. Clearly there’s an appetite for seriously good ham in Leeds (friendsofham.com).
■ Experiencing Heston Blumenthal’s food just got random. Following the announcement that in February the Fat Duck relocates from Bray to Melbourne for six months while the mothership is renovated comes news that to bag a table there you have to enter a ballot (thefatduckmelbourne.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
