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.
