Waterside Bistro and Bar, Wharf Street, Shipley BD17 7DW (01274 594 444). Starters £5.50-£8.50, mains £17-£29, desserts £7.50, wines from £18
Some of the best journeys bring you right back home. Paul Huddleston has been on exactly that journey. For a few years he cooked at the Criterion, when Marco Pierre White had the lease on London’s most outrageous room, and used it to make chicken kiev sexy. Afterwards he went to Paris to cook at another landmark, Le Jules Verne, perched on the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, where it could look down on all the other restaurants. Superstar chef Alain Ducasse was in charge then and he liked to dispatch his brigades off on stints at his other outposts. Huddleston went to the Michelin three-star Louis XV in Monaco, where the dining room groans with pendulous chandeliers and the glint and shimmer of the Mediterranean is part of the deal.
Finally, Huddleston made that trip home, to open his own restaurant by his own stretch of water. He returned to an old Yorkshire stone Quayside building in Shipley, down by the canal where the painted houseboats nudge each other along, and the dogs who live aboard those barges stand forever proud, sniffing the air, faithful until death. It’s not Monaco. It’s much better than that.
Just before the lockdown eased, I tweeted restaurants outside London asking them to let me know their reopening plans. I was getting a lot of effusive electronic traffic from glitzy places in the capital. I was getting far less information from elsewhere, and a partial story is no story at all. My inbox filled quickly with a heartening narrative. We have had cause during this crisis to talk of something called the Hospitality Industry, as if it were akin to steel manufacturing, when in truth it is just a bunch of people trying to show a bunch of other people a really nice time. And here those people were: nervous of what was to come, exasperated by the sophistry, preening and mixed messages from central government, but gagging to do their best in the circumstances.
Most of the emails came from the restaurants themselves. Some, however, came from customers who were simply delighted that a place they loved was reopening. They had missed an old friend. The Waterside Bistro and Bar in Shipley was one of those. It has a lot of customers who love it very much, and I can quite see why. From a tiny kitchen Paul and his sous chef Elvis – there really is a guy works down the bistro swears he’s Elvis; sorry, but I had to – turn out plates of big flavoured food, underpinned by big kitchen technique. You could start with a prawn cocktail here, but that cocktail will come with nuggets of deep-fried lobster, and the funky kick of brown crabmeat and nutmeg. There will be crisp leaves of lettuce, built for scooping. You can follow that with a steak from an animal raised nearby, but it will have been dry-aged in a room lined with salt from the Himalayas and come with a range of sauces – peppercorn, Diane – so classic they could name a horse race after them.
So far so gloriously, encouragingly 70s. All those dishes need is a Demis Roussos soundtrack to complete the moment. But there is more recent ambition at work here. Even just a thimble of vegetable soup to get us going is a luscious, well-made thing and, on a summer’s day that’s auditioning for autumn, it’s welcome. Alongside that prawn, crab and lobster cocktail there’s a very competent terrine of confit chicken and apricots, served just warm enough so that it’s soft and yielding, with a salad of micro herbs and an apricot gel. It has not sacrificed eatability for looks. It’s made by someone who knows you have come for lunch, not to admire the handicrafts.
A thick disc of braised pork collar arrives with pieces of roasted fillet and golden, bubbled fragments of battered black pudding that shatter beneath the teeth. For we are in Yorkshire and this is what a proper lunch looks like. There are delicate rings of pickled onion and to bring it all together a sweet savoury cider and pork stock jus.
It’s a great sauce and only beaten to the win by the rust-coloured lobster bisque that comes with a seared fillet of skin-on trout perched on crushed new potatoes, spun through with crab. The sauce performs a very good supporting role on the plate, but I’m not ashamed to tell you I ended up spooning it out of the jug, mostly because I’ve realised a sense of shame will never serve me well in this job. Perched on top, like the star on the top of a Christmas tree, is a fried raviolo of crab and ginger.
At around £17 each, both of these dishes are great value. There’s also a pared-back lunch menu: battered hake and beef dripping chips for £9; a fish finger or mackerel sandwich; a bavette for £12. If you’re one of those cracking your knuckles prior to typing an online comment whingeing about price, please consider the current realities. First, for the quality and volume – this is Shipley, after all, and here portion size is always worthy of discussion – the bill would be reasonable even in normal circumstances. But these are not normal circumstances. They have an outside terrace area overlooking the canal that will work for lunches and, with heaters, for some balmy evenings.
But the inside dining room with its brown wood floor and ceiling and rough old York stone does not have space for many at the best of times and now, with tables removed to maintain social distancing, is further restricted. To state the bloody obvious, fewer tables mean less income, mean a tougher route to survival. Paul and his wife Nicola told me they did OK during lockdown. Both went to work for Morrisons, and they were able to keep their two other employees on furlough. But they need support. If you can give it, please do.
We get a platter of desserts. To one side is a bronzed bakewell tart in a case of what seems like compressed puff. To the other is a layered cake of soft, dense chocolate sponge with a filling of salted peanut butter caramel. In between these two is a scoop of a bright rhubarb ice-cream. I try to imagine what Alain Ducasse would have made of it all in Monaco, and then I realise I really don’t care. Paul Huddleston came home and brought his good taste with him. That’s what matters.
News bites
Although restaurants are gently reopening, many businesses are still innovating to keep trading. One of those is The Clink, the UK charity which runs restaurants from within four prisons, providing training in catering skills to serving prisoners. The Clink at HMP Brixton has just launched Clink@Home. It’s a delivery service of dishes, to be heated at home, to within five miles of the prison. Starters include sun dried tomato and parmesan arancini or vegetable gyoza at £3.95 each, while mains – jerk chicken with rice and peas, lasagne, sea bream en papillote – are all £8. There’s a minimum order of £35. Visit athome.theclinkcharity.org.
Meanwhile the much-admired Manchester-based Rudy’s pizza group have launched a bake-at-home pizza menu, delivered nationwide. All pizzas, which currently include the calabrese, the portobello and the carni, are £6.50 each and simply require finishing in the oven at home. There is a minimum order of four pizzas. Visit rudyspizza.co.uk.
For more of this sort of thing, take a look at greatfood2u.co.uk which has brought together meal kit offerings from a number of independent operators for delivery nationwide. Names already represented include fried chicken company Mother Clucker, Bleeker Burger and Mexican food specialists Benito’s.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
This article was amended on 27 July 2020 to correct the restaurant’s telephone number
