Paradise Food, Daleside Nurseries, Ripon Road, Killinghall, Harrogate HG3 2AY (01423 877109). Starters £10-£18; mains £18-£28; desserts £4-£10; wines from £25.50
Paradise is a restaurant in a shed at the bottom of a garden, but oh what a shed, and oh what a garden. The shed is a slatboard building over sturdy grey-painted girders. Inside is a broad, white-walled space, big on Yorkshire flagstones, shiny-leafed rubber plants and garden tables of the sort advertised in Sunday colour supplements, much like the one in which this column appears. The soft, grey-upholstered chairs are wide and engineered for those of us with more senior bottoms which insist upon padding. There is light, and warmth and cake. We’ll come back to the cake. The garden is likewise not some diminutive lawn, with a carefully trimmed herbaceous border. It is Daleside, a garden centre on the edge of Harrogate, where nothing bad can ever happen. It is not the kind of garden centre just for a couple of things for the patio and a rusting iron cutout of a hare. You could replant a forest from the stock here. Like the shed, it is big-boned and significant.
I long ago became intrigued by the phenomenon of the garden centre not merely as somewhere to stock up on bulbs, but as a nice day out. Like morris dancing and wearing mustard-coloured cords, I didn’t regard it as my kind of thing. Any garden centre housing a restaurant like this is my kind of thing. Paradise is a late-career venture from a team led by Frances Atkins who, for two decades, was chef-proprietor at the highly regarded Yorke Arms in Ramsgill. There, she cooked the sort of precise and tightly framed food loved by punters and guides alike: a parsley velouté with a tiny quenelle of parsley root-flavoured cream; battered skate, with picked crab and deep-fried chillies, spritzed with lime; arterial-rare venison with black pudding. In 2017, with her husband Bill ready to retire from running the business, they sold the restaurant.
Atkins had no idea how to retire. She bought a caravan and for much of the pandemic ran it as a café, selling coffee and cake in Harrogate and here at Daleside. (The caravan is now owned by the noble Bettys, and is still trading.) Then Daleside suggested she bring a version of her food inside this newbuild. Atkins is now 74. I know this because she told me, unasked, as a way of explaining what she regards as her limited trading hours. The concession to the mounting years is that they are open only for breakfast and lunch and, apart from two evening services a month, close at 5pm. They are closed entirely on Sundays and Mondays. “I’ve got my evenings back,” she said. Didn’t she think of just retiring? “I’m like a hamster on a wheel,” she said. “I can’t stop.”
So she opened this with her head chef, Roger Olive, and her general manager, John Tullett, whose first names supply the other initials in their email address. In a well-heeled, well-upholstered and extremely comfortable way, what they have created together is utterly civilised. You can even book a table by phone. As it’s aimed at a Harrogate demographic with time for a good weekday lunch, it’s not cheap. Starters are priced in the mid-to-high teens. Mains are in the 20s. On the upside these are Yorkshire portions, so you won’t be spending £6 on a side of grilled hispi. They don’t offer sides. At the heart of each dish is a muscular centre point, then dressed and amplified. It’s as if a costume designer like the great Sandy Powell has been briefed to make your lunch functional, but also gorgeous to behold.
With the starters there’s a little 90s-style vertiginous stacking. A tuna fish cake is crisp-shelled and soft-centred and verging on the delicate. What makes it, are the caesar-dressed salad leaves underneath, and the pickled vegetables on top, like a hat. There is a chive-sprinkled dollop of mayo and a spiced vegetable purée. A hot cheese tart is made with the crumbliest of shortcrust pastries, baked until golden, then layered with onion chutney. Over that is a rarebit-like layer of cheesy loveliness, burnished under the grill. It sits like a crown atop a salad tangled with intense folds of dry-cured Yorkshire ham. There are florets of deep-fried kale and batons of apple. It’s a plate of cheese and ham, only in top hat and tails and dancing in the limelight.
A chunky slab of cod has been marinated in the earthy tones of turmeric before being roasted. It rests in a thick lake of a butter emulsion, mined with sea vegetables. Three sizeable cubes of pork belly have the crispiest of cracklings and the softest of meat. They stand in an honour guard around a cylinder of the smoothest of black puddings. So all the superlatives. There is gravy. There is mustard mash. There is a little stewed apple. It’s both precise and generous cookery. Although they offer three loftier bottles, the rest of the wine list is a short, keenly priced, largely European offering. The most expensive white is a lovely pinot blanc by Hugel at £38; a bargain, given it retails for around £16.
To one side is a glass cabinet of cake at about £5 a slice: icing-crusted lemon drizzle, neatly stratified millionaire’s shortbread, coffee and walnut, apricot and almond, chocolate and raspberry and more. For this is still a garden centre and by law in these parts it must have a tea room. Accordingly, their cake game must be strong. The coffee is good. The tea is Yorkshire. Anything else would bring a mob to the door waving the centre’s ready supply of pitchforks. At the very least there would be chuntering. My fellow diners look like they could chunter for Britain if unhappy. They aren’t unhappy.
We share an individual treacle tart, served warm, with crisp pastry and a filling which sits in that marvellous place between soft and chewy, and muse on what a long lunch would be like here on a summer’s day out by the lake beyond the patio doors. We conclude it would be very nice indeed. My late mother was a devout atheist, as am I. Claire was once asked, by a brave interviewer, what she thought heaven would be like. I’ll never forget the answer, which I considered wise. “Just this,” she said. “It’s here. It’s now.” There is of course, no such thing as paradise. It’s a sweet fantasy. But there’s always a great lunch cooked by Frances Atkins in a Yorkshire garden centre. As a version of paradise, it will more than do.
News bites
A new food-delivery business, utilising school kitchens after hours and at weekends, launches in York on 19 March. School Kitchen, which will start by operating from Carr Junior School, will offer four menus, with dishes from Sri Lanka, Mexico, Thailand and Spain, from which customers will be able to mix and match. A portion of revenues will go back to the schools involved, and the company will also provide free cookery classes for pupils, and an apprenticeship scheme for recent school leavers in the area. schoolkitchen.com
A branch of the Karen’s Diner chain, which sells itself on its deliberately rude staff, has closed in Brighton after traces of drugs were found all over the premises. According to local Brighton newspaper the Argus, a police licensing check found traces of cocaine, heroin, MDMA and ketamine throughout the business, including in the toilets and on the kitchen pass. ‘There are some very high readings and most alarmingly a (very high reading) for cocaine on the baby-changing table,’ Sergeant Vince Lam told the Argus. A spokesperson for the parent company, which has ended the franchise agreement for the Brighton outpost, said: ‘Clearly the restaurant has operated outside of our guidelines and this is unacceptable.’
The team behind the Edinburgh Castle in Ancoats, Manchester, has just opened a second food pub. The Lamb of Tartary occupies what was Cottonopolis in the city’s Northern Quarter. The menu, overseen by the Edinburgh Castle’s head chef Shaun Moffat, includes oysters with pickled rhubarb, a lamb scotch egg, chops with fried egg and chips and lobster hollandaise. lamboftartary.co.uk
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
