The Great Estate

A couple of years ago not many people would have bet on the A1034 between South Cave and Market Weighton becoming a key culinary route through East Yorkshire. Yet today this pleasant but unremarkable 8-mile stretch of minor road can boast a multiple award winning gastropub in the shape of the Star at Sancton, it’s seen the relocation of Hull’s popular Boar’s Nest to the Rudston Walk hotel and then the arrival of Drewton’s at the Drewton Estate – a farm shop/ deli/ butchers/ tea room which is now dipping it’s toe in fine dining. If this pattern continues the A1034 may well soon find itself renamed ‘Restaurant Row’ or (and I’d love it if this happened) ‘Gastronaut Gulch’.

Drewton’s farm shop opened in late 2010 and it’s offering of local produce, in-store butchered meat and top national artisan produce proved an instant hit with the riding’s foodies. The complex was purpose-built behind a farmhouse on the Drewton estate and is located around 2 miles north of South Cave. Its handsome barn-style buildings also include a café area, kitchen shop and a dedicated dining room. It’s in this dining room that fine dining is being offered, on Saturday nights only for the time being until a reputation is established and a regular clientele enticed into the countryside.

Without wishing to start with an unrepresentative negative point, one issue they will have to try and solve is the lack of a holding area. When you arrive for the Supper Club – as Saturday nights have been dubbed – you enter the dining room and are immediately sat at your table. The option of starting your evening with a drink in the bar while you peruse the menu would be very welcome.

That minor gripe aside, the rest of the experience is wonderful. The 30-odd seater dining room is wood-floored, stone-walled and a little ‘bistro-y’ but it’s nicely lit, with chalk boards and arty photos on the walls and a pleasant jazz-tinged soundtrack. Our waitress Sara (a credit to the place, incidentally) brought us a flaky, crusty fresh-baked half loaf and as we dipped chunks into the accompanying oil and balsamic reduction and we got our chance to unwind and begin debating the menu.

Not that there is too much to debate. Four starters, four mains and four desserts is the sensibly minimal choice and every one of them is a either a British classic or a British classic with a twist. Local produce is identified throughout and while we may not know much about the provenance of head Chef Adam Banks himself (I later find out that he has a decade of experience working in various local kitchens) he has designed a simple, tempting menu with all of the options reading as well as the next.

We plump for a spicy beef and tomato soup, which had a deep, beefy taste but was a tad over-blitzed in the blender, and a superb plate of seared scallops with black pudding and avocado and chilli salsa. I know what you’re thinking but the avocado and chilli went surprisingly well with the perfectly cooked scallops and the tender, yielding, made-on-the-premises black pudding. There were also sun-dried tomatoes scattered around which deserved equal billing as they stand their ground well against the other ingredients. At £5.25 and £6.50 respectively both were decent portions and good value.

Mains were a rib eye of Yorkshire beef with grilled toms, field mushroom, chunky chips (stacked Jenga-style, predictably) and béarnaise sauce – a solid return for anyone’s £17.55 – and Drewton’s estate roasted partridge with roasted vegetables and cranberry jus. The estate is best-known for its game and was ably represented by this sample, a moist bird with plenty of meat on it. The delicious roasted veg included peppers, courgette and new tatties and the jus was laced with a few dozen juicy whole cranberries. At a very reasonable £15.45, it would have been dish of the night, but then desserts arrived…

The Baileys and toffee cheesecake on the other side of the table went down a treat but my sticky toffee pudding with vanilla ice cream won the day by a comfortable couple of laps. Now, we all know you can’t beat a good STP but I promise you that you would have to go fair way to beat this particular one. I can’t say it was the best sticky toffee pudding in the world (after all there may be a better one served somewhere in Mongolia that I don’t know about) but it was certainly the best one I’ve ever had. It had everything – stickiness, softness, tack from the melted dates and, as the ice cream finally melted over the last of it, a small fight broke out over who would get the final spoonful (I won thanks to a deftly executed headlock).

When any restaurant finds one thing they do supremely well they must protect it and ensure they maintain it as a speciality of the house. Pay heed Drewton’s, because that STP will definitely bring people back for more.

Desserts were £5 to £7.65 and with wines starting from around £19 the whole evening delivered six solid dishes, one bottle of red and two full bellies for a relatively reasonable £75.

The Saturday Supper Club at Drewton’s is currently an experiment in cautious expansion by this new-found but canny venture. Judging by the experience we had last Saturday night I hope it’s an experiment that finds favour with the public. Locally-sourced food this good is a very welcome addition to East Yorkshire’s culinary map and Drewton’s Supper Club may well become another memorable stopping point along the A1034’s nascent gastronomic route.

Open: Saturday nights only 6:30 to 10PM.

The Drewton Estate

South Cave

Nr Brough

East Yorkshire

HU15 2AG

Tel: 01430 425079

http://www.drewtons.co.uk

Can it really be 10 years since Phoenix Nights was first on TV? Has it been a full decade since Peter Kay brought us his vision of Brian Potter, the Phoenix Club and the motley cast of characters inhabiting Bolton’s most celebrated bolt-hole? It can and it is. It was 2001 when we were first introduced to Brian, Jerry St. Clair, Ray Von, Los Alanos, Kenny Snr, Young Kenny, Holy Mary, Den Perry and, of course, the most famous brace of bouncers in club land – Max and Paddy.

In the intervening years the actors and performers who brought those much-loved characters to life have gone on to claim success in their own right; some continued in TV, some moved onto stand-up, some did both. Only Peter Kay himself seems to have disappeared off the radar – What, we wonder, happened to him? Where is he now?

Perhaps the most high-profile success of any of the entire Phoenix Nights alumni (oh, alright, apart from Peter Kay) has been enjoyed by the man you’re here to see tonight: Paddy McGuinness.

Rewind to the start of the 00’s and we find that the young – or, at least, younger – Patrick Joseph McGuinness had tried his hand at many a trade. He’d been a waiter, a warehouseman, a labourer, a holiday rep and a lifeguard – but none of these trades stuck, none satisfied his keen mind, quick wit and desire to perform.

His old school mate Peter Kay had employed him in some of his fledgling TV excursions but the odd guest spot was not providing secure enough employment for Paddy to be able to give up his string of unsatisfying jobs. Then Peter wrote the part of Paddy the lothario bouncer for him in his upcoming Channel 4 sitcom and fate took care of the rest. After two series and numerous awards for the show, Paddy (the man, not the character) was confident enough in his onscreen talents to believe that he had finally found his métier. His full-time day job was now to be – performing.

Fast forward a few years. By the time the decade finished Paddy was firmly established as a sitcom, stand-up and TV star and these days, with the phenomenal success of ITV’s Take Me Out, is even a bone fide, grade-A much-beloved TV game show host. Who’d have predicted that when Phoenix Nights first aired?

And here we are, autumn 2011, and Paddy is booked to play his first full-scale arena tour. How are things going? What can we expect from the show? What’s your favourite biscuit? Only one man can answer these questions. We found Paddy during preparations for the tour and cornered him for a chat and a catch up. So, Mr. McGuinness, it sounds like the last decade has been quite a ride?

‘10 years!’ exclaims Paddy from the comfort of his Bolton home. ‘Where does the time go, eh? One minute you’re a young whippersnapper wrestling dwarves outside the Phoenix Club, the next you’re hosting a Saturday night dating show on prime time TV. I’ve got some great memories from the past ten years. Unfortunately a super-injunction stops me from talking about them.’

They’re memories that everyone can readily share as most of them were formed while making some very popular, very public projects. As well as the aforementioned Phoenix Nights and Take Me Out, Paddy has also – deep breath – starred in and co-wrote Phoenix Nights spin-off Max and Paddy’s Road To Nowhere, taken on numerous sporting challenges (against deceptively intelligent but utterly unfit opponent Rory McGrath) in two series of Channel 5’s Rory and Paddy’s Great British Adventure, made a work-out video, performed a (frankly disturbing) dance version of ‘(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life’ with Keith Lemon for Comic Relief, hosted celebrity Arctic challenge show 71 Degrees North for ITV, written a book (My Guide To The North), appeared in panto with Robbie Williams, in a string of celebrated TV ads with some pies, toured extensively with his own Dark Side and Plus You! tours and recorded and released three best-selling live DVD’s.

With all this very public success, it’s surprising that, when the last series of Take Me Out came to an end, Paddy’s Dad thought it necessary to offer his son a loan! ‘Ha-Ha, that was true.’ Paddy confirms, ‘My dad is in his 80’s and very old school. If I’m not doing Take Me Out, he automatically thinks that I must be signing on. No good telling him about the arena tour or any other TV work that I do, it’ll be lost on him.’

Perhaps this current Saturday Night Live tour will convince McGuinness Snr that his lad can finally stand on his own two feet. It’s easily the biggest jaunt that Paddy’s yet undertaken, if only in terms of the size of the venues. Nine big gigs in nine very big rooms; daunting for a rock band, never mind a one-man-band. So how does he intend to make a connection to the people right at the back of these huge arenas? Paddy has a plan… ‘There is a point during all the arena dates were I interact and connect with every single person in the room. Oh, and we’re also going to have a game of Take Me Out at some point during proceedings. I’ve always enjoyed a bit of audience interaction and, like Jeremy Kyle on a council estate, that’s when I’m at my happiest.’

Maybe he could get the audience to arrive dressed for the occasion? To enhance the atmosphere, Prince once famously asked his audience to come to gigs dressed only in peach-coloured clothing. ‘I think not’ chortles Paddy, ‘Considering Prince makes Susan Boyle look sane, I won’t be taking a leaf out of his audience prerequisite. Also, I’m playing Glasgow and the North East, would you want to tell a few thousand Scots and Geordies to dress in peach?!’

Fair point, but now you’re a big star, what about strange requests for your rider (that’s showbiz talk for backstage refreshments)? Steak and caviar pies, perhaps or Tunnock caramel wafers in gold wrappers? ‘I’m very partial to a Nandos. By God, it’s morish, and I do enjoy a Fox’s Party Ring. In fact, I pretty much enjoy all kinds of biscuits but I can take or leave a bourbon.’

What about surprises in the new show? Any plans to do impressions or singing or sword swallowing? This question brings a very reasonable response. ‘Have you been drinking? Has he been drinking?’

OK, so no new, unexpected developments in the act, no strange backstage demands and no getting the audience to dress up; what about the location of the venues? They all seem to be in the North. Was this deliberate or was it simply that no-one noticed when the tour was being organised? ‘I only had October free and after being in the Arctic (shooting the second series of 71 Degrees North) for a month earlier this year, I had a disclaimer put in my contract. I can now never be more than an hour and a half away from home! Having said that, we’ve all got mortgages, and I’m looking forward to doing the rest of the UK sometime in 2012.’ He then realises he may have said too much and adds, ‘Ssshhh, that’s just between us.’

So, Paddy has this Autumn tour and a new series of 71 Degrees North on TV right now, but what can we expect in 2012? ‘Well, the new series of Take Me Out will be on; I’ve got a new comedy panel show that I’m very excited about. I’ll hopefully be back on the road with this tour and, weather permitting, I’m looking forward to getting a new shed for the back yard.’

Big plans, but the shed sounds like a bit of a pipe dream, to be honest – he’ll never find the time. Finally, as the success of Take Me Out means Paddy is now challenging fellow cheeky-chappy Northerners Ant & Dec for the title of ‘Mr Saturday Night’, does he think he can steal their crown anytime soon? ‘You’ll never beat those two cheeky scamps when it comes to Saturday night TV. To be mentioned in the same breath is very flattering but for the time being I’m still on a learning curve. I’ve always loved Saturday night TV and, by Thor’s hammer, long may it continue.’

Long may it continue, indeed, and with all the irons he has in the fire who would bet against a resourceful chap like Paddy managing to forge his own hammer if Thor’s isn’t up to the job?

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Saturday Night Live tour. Enjoy your evening, folks. It’s been at least 10 years in the making.

This article appeared in The Dalesman in September 2011.

Bridge For The Living: 30 years of the Humber Bridge

For anyone living in and around Hull anytime in the past 30 years the Humber Bridge has been an unavoidable addition to their lives. For some it’s integral to their day, for others it’s an adjunct, for many it’s just that big thing they see in the distance, but all who live within view of what was the longest single span bridge on Earth have their own relationship with it.

The bridge was conceived as long ago as the 1930’s but only became a reality in 1966, when Harold Wilson’s government promised its construction to guarantee victory in the Hull North by-election. [Wilson needed every seat he could get to bolster an unworkable parliamentary majority]. At the time Hull was one of the most important ports in Europe and improved connections to the rest of the country were vital to the city’s continuing success. The cod war, however, and consequent decline in Hull’s fishing fortunes meant that by the time the bridge was opened in 1981 it was already being labelled a ‘white elephant’ and many believe it has never impacted on the region in the positive way it was meant to.

Whether it has succeeded or not there’s no denying it’s a breathtaking structure. Approaching it from the West or East on train or along the A63, or from the south up the A15 you see only glimpses of the tower tops until you are within about 3 miles of it; then you are honoured with the full spectacle. The immense towers, zig-zagging cables and arching roadway all become bigger, more impressive and more improbable the closer you get; and crossing it makes the world around seem an incredible place – the wide river, sand banks, shoreline, woods and the distant sea; every part of the vista made more beautiful by the ingenuity of man.

Like many people in Hull I grew up watching the bridge being made. I vividly remember the North tower slowly growing on Hessle foreshore (right at the point where the Wolds start), I remember the little wheely-gig gizmo that ran along the main cables for months on end carrying the 44 thousand miles of steel wire that joined the two towers and I remember the day when the deck section being lifted from a barge in the Humber up to road level decided not to play ball and hung vertically above the river – it seemed like most of the city was on the foreshore that night watching this huge steel box dangle like a conker and hoping to see it drop.

Despite living with a few miles of the bridge my entire life I’ve always had mixed emotions about it – I believe it’s an amazing thing, no doubt, but it hasn’t worked in that it hasn’t brought us closer to the rest of the country and it hasn’t improved the finances of the region. It just stands there looking amazing but adding no other value to our quality of life. Then, a few months ago, I was offered a new perspective – I got to go to the top of the towers.

I was commissioned by the Humber Mouth literary festival to make a short film based on Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Bridge For The Living’ which he wrote to commemorate the opening of the bridge. The poem is very optimistic about the potential of the bridge and I wanted to make a film that mirrored that optimism but also questioned the relevance of the poem now we’ve accrued 30 years of hindsight. I suddenly had to think long and hard about the Humber Bridge and what exactly it means to Hull, East Yorkshire and me.

The current bridge master, an ex-professional abseiler named John Williams, was very accommodating and allowed me a few hours at the top of the North tower, inside one of the box sections and in the anchorage (the room at where all of the cables separate and are embedded into concrete) to gather footage. Health and safety means that few people get to go to the top of the bridge these days so it was a rare privilege. You access the top via a tiny 4 foot by 2 foot elevator inside the tower (how you would be rescued if it broke down I can’t imagine) and when you exit onto the top crossbeam, some 155 metres above the Humber, you get a view unrivalled in the UK. Canary Wharf and a couple of other skyscrapers in London are a bit taller but nowhere else are you so high, so open to the elements and so immediately aware of the immense power of the structure on which you’re standing. The platform is only about 4 metres wide and, while you’re obviously perfectly safe, you feel vulnerable just by virtue of being so high up.

At this height you can see right up and down the Humber, as far as the North Sea to the East, and on a good day you can see Beverley Minster to the North and Lincoln Cathedral to the South, though not on this sunny but hazy day. From this viewpoint the immediate vicinity appears much more industrious than I had previously realised; there are a fair number of vehicles crossing the bridge, a huge amount passing under it on the A63, trains running in and out of Hull every few minutes and even the river seems busy with vessels of all sizes moving in and out of the docks and the marina in Hull and several cargo ships passing under the bridge on their way to and from Goole. With the houses and other buildings small and unmoving below what catches the eye most is the amount of movement happening on and around the bridge – it suddenly and very demonstrably seemed to be that which it was originally intended, a vital part of the transport network, a gateway to elsewhere.

With the controversial increase in tolls and a plan to buy the bridge mooted there has been much debate about the Humber Bridge recently. The 30th anniversary year has seen renewed interest, debate and controversy. For those paying £3 a pop to cross it or the haulage firms forced to pay undeniably excessive toll charges, it casts a much larger financial shadow than a physical one and, without doubt, the stigma of being a white elephant will never disappear until the toll is abolished. Whether it will ever be paid off, whether it will ever be free to cross, whether it should ever have been built at all, I don’t know. What I do know, what this year has taught me is that the Humber Bridge is an underused icon and rather than unifying, it divides. Instead of celebrating and venerating it the people of East Yorkshire seem to be slightly unsure of it, even slightly ashamed. And that is a great but amendable shame.

For my part, I’m going to paraphrase the title of Dr Strangelove and stop worrying and learn to love the bridge. It’s an amazing and beautiful structure and we should have pride in it. Since making the film of ‘Bridge For The Living’ it’s now become an unavoidable part of my life and I keep reminding myself of the last line in Larkin’s poem, which works on for me on both a literal and metaphorical level: ‘Always it is by bridges that we live’.

This review originally appeared in the Yorkshire Post in November 2011.

 Home On The Grange

Prior to my visit to Tickton Grange I’d always thought of it as simply a wedding venue. Indeed, a quick straw poll amongst friends and family revealed all had exactly the same opinion – it’s the posh wedding place near Beverley, they offered to a man. It’s a long-held view which can be changed utterly, however, by one outstanding meal at their under-exploited restaurant. A popular wedding venue Tickton Grange undeniably is, but it’s also one of the best places to eat in East Yorkshire.

The Grange is about 4 miles east of Beverley on the Bridlington road. Its restaurant offers formal but comfortable dining in one 30-odd seat room and a second, single-table 20 seater. Chef David Nowell has been in the kitchen here for around 20 years. He hails from the area and, after working in high pressure establishments around the UK and America, came home to Cottingham, took the job at the Grange and has dedicated the last two decades to building a solid team (including two of his sons) serving the hotel’s guests and those locals on-the-ball enough to know the restaurant is here.

Until we sat in the cosy bar, perusing the menu I hadn’t realised how much of their food is sourced locally – fish from Skipsea; crab and lobster from Brid; meats, cheeses, beer, cider, even oil from East Yorkshire and honey from hives not 100 yards from the kitchen’s back door. The dishes themselves all sounded invitingly appetising. There were just 5 or 6 options for each course – which is always a good sign – and all of such mouth-watering promise it made making a choice a welcome chore.

We moved into the dining room, selected a bottle of spicy Spanish red from the reassuringly robust wine list and ordered starters of pheasant ballotine with crisp cured ham, red cabbage and parsley bubbles and the intriguingly-monikored ‘textures’ of pumpkin with smoked goat’s cheese. After an unexpected and playful amouse-bouche of spiced parsnip pannacotta with pear jelly and goat’s cheese cookie (sounds odd, tastes lovely), our dishes were served and immediately we were struck by how much skill had been invested into preparing the food.

Both plates were so artfully designed and built with such precision that it honestly felt a shame to allow our cutlery to demolish them. The shapes on the plate, alone, were a joy to behold – rolls, spears, bubbles, tubes, foam and blobs caused as much discussion as the taste when we finally tucked in. The pheasant dish was perfectly cooked, suitably Autumnal and the tastes and textures combined beautifully.

The pumpkin and goat’s cheese platter contained a series of combinations of the two ingredients. There was a raw pumpkin cannoli-style roll filled with cheese, a pumpkin sorbet, toasted pumpkin seeds, cubes of pumpkin-flavoured jelly and (best of all) a dollop of smoked goat’s cheese adorned with a leaf-shaped pumpkin leather. Subsequent investigation revealed that a ‘leather’ is made by baking a layer of pumpkin coulee in a low oven for 5 days before it is cut and served. It’s sweet, flavourful leathery-textured loveliness worked so well with the smoked cheese that I worried the rest of the meal may disappoint in comparison.

I’m glad to say that it didn’t; the main courses were equally vivid. Tender loin of pork, Kiplingcoates ‘chorizo’ hash and local cider was another extraordinary assault on the eyes. The cider had been jellified and cut into cubes, the chorizo hash had been formed into a croquette, with more chorizo cooked into a deep (in colour and taste) berry gravy, the pork wasmoist and perched on a bed of colourful kale. The whole thing was as delicious as it sounds.

The other main, pan fried venison haunch steak, sloe gin and brambles, utilised similar seasonal ingredients to equally sumptuous effect. The whole brambles and sloe berries in the sauce cut through the venison’s perfect game-iness and both dishes were bedecked with baby turnips, purple carrots, layers of various mashed potatoes and so many blobs, foams and shoots that every mouthful provided an individual treat.

Pre-dessert we shared a platter of Yorkshire cheeses; they were so simple and delicious that they would bring a surge of pride to the heart of any right-thinking resident of the county.

The final course consisted of a walnut treacle tart with chocolate cappuccino ice cream and warm espresso gel, which was chunky, tasty and hearty and a tasting plate of Yorkshire apples, which revisited the pumpkin starter concept and offered several variations on an apple theme. There was an apple crisp, a sorbet, a sherbet, crystallised apple, apple toffee, an apple crème brulee and, star of the show, a decidedly non-apple toffee honeycomb which was so delicious I wanted to head into the grounds to congratulate the bees personally.

The restaurant at Tickton Grange is not beyond criticism – the bar could do with a local cask ale, there was some way-out-of-season asparagus on the menu, there is no real sense of connection with the kitchen (not even the distant sound of slamming oven doors) and the restaurant is obviously under or ill-marketed (perhaps it would benefit from having it’s own identity?) – but any negatives are far outweighed by the positives. If it is to continue, the culinary renaissance currently sweeping the East Riding needs places like Tickton Grange turning out locally-sourced, distinguished dishes of this level of wit, intelligence and invention.

As we were leaving, we passed a happy bride and groom who had wandered away from their wedding party in another part of the grounds. It was only seeing them that reminded me of Tickton Grange’s ingrained reputation in the local area; the food we had enjoyed during the night, however, had totally and permanently changed my personal perception of the place.

Prices:

3 courses £37.50

Cheese course 7.50

Wines: £19 upwards

Open: Lunchtimes everyday between 12-2, Evening service 7 – 9.30

Beverley Tickton Grange Country House Hotel & Restaurant

Tickton

Beverley

East Yorkshire

HU17 9SH

Tel: 01964 543666

www.ticktongrange.co.uk

This article originally appeared on Sabotage Times.

In the 1970’s Francis Ford Coppola made four quite brilliant films; the magnificent Godfather, the even-better Godfather part 2 and the legendary Apocalypse Now you already know about, but you may have missed a film that was easily the equal of these masterpieces – The Conversation. Made on a small budget between the Godfathers, it’s a film that was on the money in its day and still has a lot to say about spying, subterfuge, loss, regret, madness and decorating.

After the first Godfather film’s unexpected and unprecedented success writer/ director Coppola decided to flex his new-found muscle and bring a long-cherished project to fruition. He’d originally written The Conversation in the mid 60’s after seeing Antonioni’s Blow Up, which includes similar themes of illicit surveillance and terrible secrets revealed through obsessive scrutiny. Unlike Blow Up, though, The Conversation doesn’t feature photography but secret audio recording – a decision which was to prove startlingly prescient.

The film centres around Harry Caul (played with perfect restrain by Gene Hackman), a surveillance expert who lives a quiet, grey life only illuminated by his work and his sax, which he plays along to jazz records in his sparse bachelor flat. He’s revered by fellow ‘buggers’ and recognised as the best in his field, partly because of a job he undertook a few years earlier which colleagues believed impossible. This job lead to the deaths of three innocent people and Harry is still haunted by his (ostensibly innocent)) involvement with those events.

In the opening scene we witness a young couple wandering around Union Square in San Francisco engaged in a seemingly innocent conversation. It soon becomes clear that everything they are saying is being recorded by Harry and his team of heavily- equipped sound recordists. Over the next few days we follow Harry as he mixes the separate recordings of the conversation into a single, intelligible take; something he has been hired to do by his client, ‘the director’. We also meet Harry’s associates (including the very marvellous John Cazale playing Stan in one of only five films the actor made) and get a glimpse into his fairly dull, detached private life. Its clear Harry is obsessed with privacy and that his everyday paranoia level is calibrated slightly higher than most.

As Harry pieces the conversation together and begins dealing with the director’s untrustworthy staff he runs the risk of breaking his own code of conduct and, as it becomes apparent that there may be malevolent forces at work, starts to become involved with the subject of his work. The more Harry learns, the deeper his paranoia becomes and eventually he embroils himself in another murder plot, which ends in a very different way than we or Harry are expecting. By the end Harry has lost everything; his integrity, his professional distance, his wallpaper, his floorboards and much of his mind. It’s a slow, shattering disintegration and the viewer feels absolute pity for a dignified man brought down both by disillusionment with his life’s work and the machinations of big business.

It’s an amazing film; very American but obviously in debt to European art house, slow and intense but never dull, brilliantly acted, cleverly shot and with sound design (by the legendary Walter Murch) that is as important to the plot and the characters development as any other element – something that is rarely the case. The music, too, is superb. The score was written in advance of filming by Davis Shire – composer of, among others, the under-acclaimed original Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three – and consists mainly of a lilting, melancholy piano piece. As the film progresses and Harry’s state of mind deteriorates the music matches Harry’s confusion by replacing the tinkling piano with of hammered keys and discordant sounds.

Remarkably, the film was released amid the ongoing Watergate affair but unlike other US paranoia films of the era (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, Chinatown) wasn’t directly inspired by those events. Despite being about illegal bugging and corporate plotting, being set in a hotel for significant scenes and featuring exactly the same surveillance equipment as that used by the Watergate agents it was already in production by the time details of Watergate started emerging and was in cinemas by the time Nixon actually resigned. Coppola was just flukily on-the-money.

The Conversation was very well received on release, won several major awards and only lost out on an Oscar for best picture to Coppola’s own Godfather Part 2 but it seems not to be held in the same regard by today’s audience as the director’s other 70’s films. While, many will have unwittingly seen Hackman play a version of Caul to lesser effect in Tony Scott’s bombastic Enemy of the State (where he portrayed a character who could very well be what Caul became a quarter century after The Conversation) but only a fraction of that audience will have appreciated the character’s provenance. The film is re-issued this week on DVD and (for the first time) on Blu-Ray and if you’ve not seen it you really should make the effort, they rarely make ‘em like this anymore.

This review originally appeared in the Yorkshire Post in October 2011.

Pub of the Week – The Moorcock Inn, Langdale End

The Moorcock Inn may just be the most Yorkshire-feeling place in the world. It sits in the North York Moors national park and to get to the pub you either have to come throughDalbyForest, Troutsdale, Stainton Dale or Harwood Dale. It’s one of only a handful of buildings in picture-perfect Langdale End and has changed barely a jot in the past 100 or so years.

It’s a handsome stone farmhouse, owned for nearly a century by the Martindale family. They served beer and food in the hardly-converted parlour of their house, while the other end of the building doubled as the village post office. Even as recently as the 1980’s Ada Martindale was to be found appearing from the cellar with a jug of beer to serve the handful of punters that could fit into the bar. By all accounts it was literally like drinking in someone’s front room.

It passed from the family, though remained locally and independently owned, and was sympathetically converted in the early 90’s. Almost all of the internal layout was maintained along with much of the furniture and the ultra-cosy feel.

Drink (including some local cask ales) is served through a hatch in the wall from what is essentially a cobbled-together lean-to bolted onto the back of the building. The food offering varies constantly depending on whim but Sunday lunch is always dependably hearty.

The pub also has an admirably cavalier attitude to opening times, they simply open when they feel like. As they have a rarely-answered phone it can be quite impossible to ascertain if and when they will be open but this only adds to the home-spun, ramshackle charm. Even if you just pitch up on the off-chance and the pub is closed it’s never a wasted visit as you’ll have seen some incredible countryside on your journey. If you’re in luck and find it open, you can sit in the bar, get a warm from the fire with a pint of best and some scratchings and know that no-one is being more Yorkshire-y than you.

Welcome                   5

Drinks selection       3

Atmosphere              5

Food                           4

Prices                         4

Andrew Barton 2011

This is a short film I made for celebrity hairdresser Andrew Barton. It was shot during the photoshoot for the images that make up his entry into this year’s British Hairdresser of the Year competition.

Andrew is probably best known as the hairdresser from Channel 4′s 10 Years Younger but also has his own Covent Garden salon and works around the world for most of the biggest hair and beauty companies.

He is a past winner of British Hairdresser of the Year (in 2006), this year’s winner will be announced on 28th November at a ceremony at Grosvenor House.

After years of admiring the works of David Hockney and, as I described in the last issue of the Dalesman, becoming a little bit obsessed with his current East Yorkshire work, I had the great fortune to meet the great man and spend a brief but enlightening amount of time in his company.

After writing about my admiration of Hockney’s ongoing work in my home county I happened across a post card in one of my office drawers that took me back to my first encounter with his work, some 30 or so years ago. It was a reproduction postcard of one of his early works ‘Life painting for myself’ which had caught my eye on one of my childhood visits to my local art gallery, the Ferens in Hull. Its a1962 abstract, a half-finished looking oil showing a figure (or two, it’s hard to tell), some hanging clothes (I think) and not much else apart from the title of the work written across the top right corner. I don’t remember what exactly struck me about the picture other than it appeared very wilful and petulant, at least compared to the gallery’s normal fair of traditional portraits by the likes of Elwell, Maragliano and Hals. Something about it, however, must have appealed to me; after all I bought a postcard of it and held on to it for three decades.

I mention it here because on discovering the postcard after all this time it struck me that my admiration for Hockney’s work must be more deeply ingrained in me than I had previously realised. Something about the Bradford-born curmudgeonly genius and his work must connect with me beyond the previously stated love for his East Yorkshire landscapes. It’s a realisation that I’m very glad came to me before the day in mid-February when I found myself stood on the steps of the York Art Gallery yarning merrily with Hockney himself.

Interest in my previous piece on Hockney lead to an invite from the Yorkshire Tourist Board (or Welcome To Yorkshire as they’re now cheerily named) to attend the opening of this year’s Art In Yorkshire programme, a series of art exhibitions occurring right through 2011 of which the northern debut of Hockney’s masterpiece ‘Bigger Trees Near Warter’ was the inaugural event. During welcoming speeches by Sir Nicholas Serota of the Tate and various tourist board and art gallery bigwigs I noticed a solid, slightly hunched grey haired figure march out through the gallery entrance to the front steps and proceed to light a cigarette in a very demonstrative fashion. A careful look confirmed my initial instincts and I realised that David Hockney himself was here and taking the opportunity the speeches presented to nip out for a crafty fag. Never one to miss an opportunity myself I forsook Sir Nick’s opening address and sidled out to try and say hello to the man of the hour.

I found him stood on the gallery steps, inhaling deeply on his cigarette and soaking in the surroundings. From the front of York Art Gallery you can see the top of the Minster, some of the Roman Wall, High Petergate and the De Grey Rooms and grand terraced houses of Saint Leonard’s Place. I took a place a few feet away, appreciating the same vista. Within a few seconds I had caught Hockney’s eye and we nodded at each other, exchanging ‘how do’s’ and ‘hello’s’. ‘It’s a grand view’, I ventured. ‘It is,’ he replied, ‘excepting that’. He waved his tab-clutching hand dismissively at the rather dull modern fountain affair a few feet in front of the gallery. ‘Aye. True enough’, says I while thinking how typical it was of Hockney to single out the one thing that offends his aesthetic sensibilities in an otherwise very pleasing view. Relationship (cautiously) established I politely offered Hockney my thanks for his recent work and expressed how much it had affected my relationship with my home county. He smiled and expressed gratitude in return. I took this as an encouragement to press on with the conversation. I told him how I often drive round the countryside looking for the locations of his paintings. ‘Found any?’ he asked. I know where the trees are near Warter. Hockney raised his eyebrows, looking mildly impressed. I said that I couldn’t see what he saw in them, I mean they’re a nice bunch of trees but I couldn’t imagine what it was about them that convinced him to spend weeks painting and photographing them. ‘It was the trees themselves, I just thought I could do something with them’ he offered as explanation. I was none the wiser but very happy to interacting with the man.

Hockney has extraordinary eyes. Both in the way they look and how he uses them. They’re a striking blue colour and as he talks to you he maintains unblinking eye contact at all times. He observes you and gauges your response to his comments; it feels like he’s deciding whether or not you know what you’re talking about, whether you understand his work or whether to walk away and leaving you standing on the gallery steps feeling like a lemon. At least that how it felt to me when it hit me that this was now my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to say something worthwhile to one of the greatest artists on the planet.

‘Why here?’ I ventured. He shrugged and smiled. For a second I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me – he struggles with his hearing – so I tried to clarify. ‘I mean, you live in LA, you’ve travelled and worked all over the world. Why the East Riding?’ He paused for a drag of fag and offered, ‘Because it changes all the time’. This is something I’ve heard from him before, he has an interest in the affect the seasons, the weather and agriculture all have on the landscape. He has often expounded theories about capturing time in paintings and photographs and had a period of creating photographic montages that attempt to illustrate the effect of time on the subject in a single image. He’ll take a set of portrait pictures and montage them in such a way that they don’t and can’t portray a single moment in time but rather they represent a period of time. He’ll paint a landscape exactly how it is in a particular moment but then return to the same spot in differing seasons and weather conditions and paint it again to see how it has been affected. Obviously, when he’s working in permanently sunny places like LA or Arizona – where he once spent months painting and photographing the Grand Canyon – the weather changes very little, if at all. The only thing that gives notice of changing time over the course of a day is the light and the shadows, both very subtle to successfully capture. East Yorkshire, in contrast, is a predominantly agricultural landscape, the workings of man and the elements have a constant, day-to-day and even hour-to-hour effect on the appearance of the landscape. This allows Hockney to put all the theories and techniques he’s been developing for years into practice. Not that long ago he spent months and months proving that 18th century painters used primitive cameras to create their pictures and he’s now showing equal dedication by spending his time proving that he’s right about capturing time in still images.

He’s using painting and photo techniques developed over many years to demonstrate that still life needn’t mean that time stands still in the image. He’s also extending the theory to video montages, using multiple cameras tracking through a landscape to create a viewpoint only normally available to the widescreen capability of the human eyes but from a viewpoint deliberately at odds with how we digest visual information – he’s made ‘bigger pictures’ on canvas and now he’s doing it in film. Of course videos do unfold over a period of time but the films he’s making unfold strictly in real time and then he shoots exactly the same scene in differing weather conditions so the films are, contrarily, presented as a series of moving stills rather than a single moving image. It’s all very high concept stuff and when he talks about it you get the impression that it’s a theory very much undergoing constant development in his own mind. He’s not making it up as he goes along – far from it – but he’s utilising all the tools available to him to reach a conclusion that only makes absolute sense in his own head. No doubt he’ll get there and when he does he’ll make sure it all becomes clear to the rest of us.

Of course, there’s no reason why he can’t do this anywhere – there are suitable landscapes in Surrey, Scotland or even round Scunthorpe – so it doesn’t entirely explain his decision to work in the East Riding. But if you factor in his ongoing family commitments in Bridlington and his childhood memories of the region (he used to work in the cornfields as a boy) it makes perfect sense for him to be here. Whatever the real reason, I’m just glad he is.

Back on the gallery steps, we chatted on about some more of his paintings I’d seen, about Brid and about how he likes his iPad – it felt, very marvellously, like just two Yorkshire blokes yabbering in the street – but eventually my personal audience was interrupted when the members of the press attending the opening twigged that they were missing a scoop. Out of the gallery poured a few notepad-clasping journalists and a camera crew. Sensing my time was at an end I withdrew a few paces and let them take my place. Hockney’s demeanour altered noticeably – he became slightly starchier and somehow distant. And as the questions the journos started asking were fairly unadventurous (‘why did you decide to come today?’ and so on) it became obvious that they weren’t expecting him to be there and hadn’t prepared any pertinent questions and so Hockney began pushing his own agenda on them. He talked of his disdain for the smoking ban and the worst city he had encountered for enforcing it – Liverpool, surprisingly. The only real answer he gave of interest was when asked when he thought he may move back to LA – ‘I don’t know, maybe soon’ he replied, much to my concern. When eventually he was ushered back inside the gallery by officials he proffered his hand to me, which I shook with gusto. ‘Nice to meet you’, he said. ‘Hope to see around’, I replied, and off he went, back into the gallery and the waiting crowd. I went for a celebratory pint.

There are now two Hockney images on my office wall. One is the postcard I bought from the Ferens all those years ago and the other is a reproduction of Bigger Trees Near Warter that I picked up from the York Art Gallery that day (adorned, though I hesitate admitting asking for it, with Hockney’s signature). When I look at them I feel a real sense of pride in East Yorkshire and a validation of my decision to continue to live here. I’ve had opportunities to move away many times – to Prague, to Australia, to London, obviously – yet I’ve lived my entire life in this unfavoured, overlooked and underappreciated part of the world. It’s a decision I’ve often questioned, contemplating how differently my life may have turned out had I gone. But when I look at those two pictures I realise that Hockney, one of the greatest artists of the past century, has lived and worked all over the globe and could choose to live the rest of his life as royalty in any land he so wishes. But he doesn’t, he chooses the same chalky hills and verdant vales as I. It says, to me, that East Yorkshire is as good a place to live as anywhere else and probably better than most. It proves you don’t have to have moved away to know you were in the right place to begin with.

This review originally appeared in the Yorkshire Post on 25th September 2011.

Come Dine With Us

It’s a brave move for any restaurant to swim against the tide. Shifting culinary trends usually determine which way the entire industry moves and at a time when the rise of gastro-pubs continues unabated it takes an establishment confident in its offering that steadfastly refuses to bend to trends.

Artisan, in the small East Yorkshire town of Hessle, are proudly, defiantly daring to be different. For them it’s an intimate setting, a set menu, unhurried service, dignified dining, minimal fuss but maximum effect – it’s an experience, a proper night out. Brave in the current financial climate but braver still when you factor in that they do all this with just 16 covers and 2 staff in a quiet town on the edge of Hull.

Husband and wife team Richard and Lindsey Johns opened their restaurant in a modest Georgian townhouse eight years ago and have since built a reputation that has enjoyed significant regional and national praise for its elegance and dedication to excellence. They argue (quite convincingly, it must be said) that a meal out should be special and unique and that turning country pubs into restaurants devalues the dining experience by diluting with excessive options what should be a rarefied atmosphere.

This philosophy isn’t snobbish, it’s ensuring that your dining experience options are kept as wide as possible rather than duplicated and homogenised. They believe that we don’t need another restaurant offering a choice of four different steaks with straight, curly or wedge chips as well as 20-odd other well-worn dishes; we need more places that offer less choice, that decide what they want you to eat and serve it without excuses. It’s certainly true that we need places like Artisan that have a philosophy, know how to stage an evening and deliver without compromise.

Richard runs the kitchen single handed, producing 5 courses every evening of exemplary design and delivery. He puts great stock in his ingredients but he also has a keen instinct for how they combine and his dishes always look sumptuous. Front-of-house better half Lindsey hosts, serves and acts as sommelier with consummate ease. She occasionally has a helping hand on busier nights but watching her glide round the dining room, keeping all her customers fed and wined, you can’t help but think that anyone sharing the space with her would just slow her down.

Set menus may well deter the pickier diner but if you were travelling across France, Italy, Spain or many other European countries with a sensible culinary tradition you’d often be presented with a sequence of no-choice dishes rather than an over-stuffed menu and you’d almost certainly throw yourself into the experience. Why complain when it happens at home? Besides, looking at our evening’s menu it’s difficult to think that we’d have chosen anything different had there been more dishes on offer.

First up was a dinky cup of sharp and tasty potato and horseradish soup served with perfect home-made tomato and roasted red pepper bread. It’s a bit posh is Artisan so we asked permission to dunk, which was granted.

A bowl of roast tomato risotto with creamed truffle goat’s cheese and parmesan crisp got the courses proper off to a colourful, creamy start. I could have eaten a family size bag of the parmesan crisps, so tangy and satisfying were they, but with so much food still ahead the supplied single blade was sensibly ample. There was a smattering of parsley mixed in the risotto to bring the flavour of the cheese along and that it did ably.

Our first ‘main’ course was wild fillet of Scottish salmon with warm citrus, herb and smoked salmon couscous, basil oil and a dollop of caviar mounted on top. I am suspiciously picky about the source of my salmon but when the answer ‘line-caught on a day boat out of Eyemouth’ met my provenance query I felt I knew all I needed save the name of the skipper. The lemon-y sharpness of the fluffy couscous worked wonderfully with the faultlessly cooked fish and the caviar was a subtle and cunning accompaniment rather than a pretentious extravagance.

Lindsey selected our wines for the evening and the powerful South African Pinotage she recommended sat deliciously with the next course – honey roast Goosenargh duck supreme. It was served with fresh truffle, spring onion crushed potatoes, duck sausage, carrot puree and red wine sauce and before we could succumb to the fatty/ oily worries that usually accompany an anatine arrival we were tucking into a marvellously-cooked wonder. The duck was mildly gamey, juicy and tender; the sausage yielding with a hint of chilli and the carrot puree so sweet and tender you could easily mistake it for custard (this is not negative, believe me). My highlight of the evening.

Dessert brought the evening’s only choice of dishes. There was crushed meringue and summer berries or a cheese board also on offer but we both decided to continue eating the same all night and plumped for Belgian chocolate pot with orange curd and crème fraiche ice cream. It looked a little undersized on arrival but closer ingestion revealed it to be thick, unctuous and sensibly apportioned. Offset by the ice cream, raspberries, peach compote and a chocolate twig it rounded off a fine array of dishes.

Our entire evening at Artisan demanded an unhurried four hours yumm-ing and aaaah-ing over beautiful food in an atmosphere of such dignified intimacy that you almost feel that you are in someone’s home dining room. At sixteen covers per evening, four evenings per week Artisan provide a special night out to far fewer people per year than probably any restaurant you can find. Their philosophy is sound – this is occasion eating of the highest order and highly recommended.

Set menu: £50 per head

Wines: £22 upwards

Open: Wed – Sat evenings and Sunday lunch on request

Artisan

22 The Weir

Hessle

East Yorkshire

HU13 0RU

Tel: 01482 644906

www.artisanrestaurant.com

This article first appeared in the Yorkshire Post in October 2011.

Bold as brass

From New York to East Yorkshire, the county’s first vegan brewer brings it all back home.

It would be a massive culture shock for most people to move from an apartment on the 45th floor of a skyscraper in New York to the garage of a house in Pocklington but that’s just what East Yorkshire’s first vegan beer-brewer Phil Saltonstall has recently done. He and wife Harriet swapped a high flying life in the Big Apple for a sleepy, booze-brewing existence in what is becoming one of Yorkshire’s most culturally dynamic towns. With the brewery he’s set up in his home he’s determined to emulate a culture that has revolutionised drinking in the US and introduce Yorkshire to the delights of nano-brewing.

Phil and Harriet both originally hail from Beverley, where they met and married. He joined the RAF and she the United Nations and when Harriet’s job as a diplomat demanded a move to New York Phil took the opportunity to take a career break, travelling with her as they set up home in one of Manhattan’s most salubrious high-rises. With his wife spending her days undertaking high powered tasks with the UN Phil started to develop his long-term interest in brewing by taking a job with a Princeton-based micro brewery. ‘I’d always been a keen home brewer’, he says over a cup of tea in his Pocklington home, ‘but what I learnt at that brewery in the states took my knowledge to a whole new level.’

The US now has a recently-developed but strong tradition of brewing boutique ales and beers in small micro breweries, they sell their wares in dedicated bars, via off-sales and on the internet. It’s most popular in New York and throughout California but it’s a business model that Phil began to realise could and should be applied in the UK. He explains, ‘It’s a part of the culture over there in a way that it’s ceased to be in the UK. We used to drink locally brewed ales in pubs or at home but do it less these days. It’s on its way back, though.’

When Harriet’s New York placement came to an end the couple returned to their native East Yorkshire and Phil took a job with the Bridlington coast guard. The experience and passion he developed for brewing stayed with him, however, and when they started looking for a house they deliberately chose one which could accommodate enough equipment for Phil to take his hobby up a gear. The garage and basement of their comfortable but far-from-large home in Pocklington was quickly transformed into Yorkshire’s first nano-brewing concern.

Brass Castle Brewery – named after the street on which they live – now produces 228 pints of three different ales per week, a capacity which Phil hopes to significantly increase in the coming months. Certainly there seems to be a real thirst (excuse the pun) for his beers. A planned launch at Pocklington’s popular beer festival Pocktoberfest had to be brought forward as word of the beer spread on the social networks. In what is a growing trend Brass Castle’s Twitter and Facebook streams created an unexpectedly expectant audience for beer which was still to be launched and so Phil sold his first barrel of ‘Cliffhanger’, a 3.8% golden ale at a local beer festival in early September. ‘The drummer from the band playing at the festival took a real shine to it’, he say, only half joking, ‘I think he accounted for most of the sales on the night.’ Then, a couple of weeks later, his Bad Kitty vanilla porter won beer of the festival at the York Beer and Cider Festival. Since then the phone hasn’t stopped ringing.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this story is that Phil and Harriet are both vegan, as is all the beer that comes out of their house. ‘Most people don’t realise that animal products are used in beer production,’ says Phil, ‘but almost all brewers use them during the filtering process to control the ‘lace’ of the head or clarity of a pint’. As a long term vegan Phil wanted to create a product free from animal product but which didn’t compromise on taste or appearance. Judging by the ecstatic response his beer has met with so far it appears he succeeded. Vegetarian cafes and restaurants would therefore seem to be an obvious outlet for the beer but Phil wants his ales to compete on an equal footing with traditionally brewed beers to show that the use of animal products is by no means essential to the process.

Phil credits his clever utilisation of the aforementioned social networks for his success so far and believes a similar approach would benefit all smaller breweries. ‘Well run Twitter and Facebook streams create a market for your product before it even exists. I’ve already sold beer that I’ve not even started brewing because landlords have contacted me via Twitter and placed orders based on word of mouth on social networks.’ It’s a business model that many small and cottage businesses are finding works for them, anyone with an innovative approach to marketing and a grasp of the rules of the social networks can sell their product right across the globe using little more than an iPhone. Phil found an online constituency keen to find exactly what he is offering and he now has the type of brand awareness amongst his target audience that some firms pay a fortune on advertising to attract.

Next up for Brass Castle is expansion. Phil’s experience of the US brewing industry has taught him that the way we enjoy and experience beer in this country is surprisingly and unnecessarily limited. The Americans drink in bars and at home, as do we, but they also buy carry outs in a way that is rarely seen this side of the pond. Imagine if you could buy beer by the pint from your local pub, deli or off license – not in bottles or cans but freshly pulled, in jugs or bladders. This is what happens in the US and although there are a few places offering the service here (the Jug & Bottle deli in Bubwith is one) it’s still a long way off being the norm. Ailing pubs, Phil believes, would almost certainly benefit from increased sales and footfall if they expanded into real ale and cider off-sales. We could quickly find ourselves drinking locally brewed beers bought from the local but drunk at home. No bottling, no cans, just fresh cask ale at home. After years of the UK being unavoidably affected by US culture this development may be one that everyone can welcome and, strangely, a lifeboat man working from his cellar may well be at the forefront of this new way the new drinking culture.