Food@York

This is a blog entry for those who would like a break from architecture, art, and history. It’s about food.

In our experience food in England is generally as bad as is claimed. And it’s generally claimed to be very bad indeed. Jamie Oliver notwithstanding.

This is just unpleasant backdrop to say that York was a consistent exception to this experience. We stayed at a B&B as that was the cheapest decent option we could find. This meant we had to buy two meals each day—not a nice thought from either the point of view of keeping costs down, of trying to buy something good for us, and trying to find something enjoyable, given our experiences so far.

But we needn’t have worried. The strength of “the English Breakfast” for tourists became clear. After having cereal, toast, eggs, bacon, and baked beans you weren’t looking at two meals for the rest of the day. You were looking for one and a half meals at best.

And those meals were of a much higher quality in York for what you paid. There were three standouts.

The first was a pub dinner on our first night. After a five hour train trip and the signs debacle, we were ready for a meal. Having heard that pubs and pub meals were a very different phenomena to Australia, we were keen to give it a try. For about £20 they fed us very, very well with food that felt like good home cooking. By Australian standards, that would have been too expensive, but from our experiences here it was a good deal. Jennie discovered that her previous enjoyment of lamb shanks wasn’t a fluke, and I confirmed my abiding appreciation of beef burgers. Almost as nice was the surroundings—the British pub has been, so far, a nice place to be. And the service, while casual, was as friendly and considerate as we’ve had (which wouldn’t be saying much normally, ‘service’ isn’t really something the British seem to do well, but this was good even by Australian standards). It was a great start to York, and helped overturn any residual feelings about that sign.

The second was a Spanish tapas restaurant. We had had a very Australian style of tapas once before in the Hunter Valley and had enjoyed it immensely. So we figured that this was a reasonable bet for something a bit exotic (neither of us are quite ready yet to try the quintessentially English ‘Spotted Dick’ or ‘Toad in a Blanket’. The names really capture the feel of English cuisine I think). This consisted of several small dishes that are shared. They had a package deal arrangement intended for newbies like us that offered a good range of dishes for two which again ended up being around £20 all up—which was an even better deal than the pub meal had been. This food was professional, restaurant style. It was also more hit and miss in actual enjoyment than the pub—some of the Spanish combination of flavours just didn’t sit right on our palates. But it was good quality and was a fresh experience to add to the mix York provided. We now know that we can enjoy authentic York Spanish cooking! An important life lesson there.

The third deserves an entry all of its own. We encountered the phenomenon that is Betty’s Tearoom. This is, as the name suggests, a tea room. Or possibly it is the Ideal tea room of which all other coffee shops are pale, inferior copies. It is decked out in 1920’s Art Deco style—looks like a scene from the restaurant on the Titanic. It serves tea and cakes and you can have High Tea (three tiers of sandwiches and cakes with your tea) there. It will, somewhat grudgingly, provide coffee and other drinks for those who don’t rise to the glory of tea.



However, this doesn’t really capture Betty’s Tearoom. This establishment is very, very serious about its business. The people on service—the person to check you into the table, the man who just stood at the top of the stairs to the basement to welcome you to the establishment and to see you off (I kid you not, that seemed to be his entire job), the waiters who took your order, the waiters who served the food, and the waiters who cleared the table (yes, three different kinds of waiters) were all immaculate and the height of professionalism. They also had all the charm and sense of hilarity of a depressed undertaker. It was a very serious business, to be partaken of, but not in a light-hearted, fun kind of way, you’ll understand. This is Tea after all!

There was a queue inside the shop, outside the door, and often for some distance beyond the shop for most of the two days we were there. Betty’s Tearoom runs its own cooking courses where you can learn to cook in the Betty Tearoom style, usually with a three course meal with wine thrown in for a cool £150 per half-day course. And it looks like it does a roaring trade. The cooking school had a faculty of around ten and a service staff of around five. No doubt fuelled by enthusiasm from customers from the six Betty’s in and around the British Isles. There is even its own cook book, so you too at home, gentle reader of this humble blog, can cook in the Betty’s style.



We went to Betty’s (feel free to have a guess at who just had to try this Tearoom. I’ll give you a hint, who doesn’t drink tea? Not him.). We queued for 45 minutes to get in. We looked at the menu. Looked at the pastries in the window (which were amazing). Took note of the prices. High Tea (sandwiches and cakes) was about the cost of a main meal elsewhere. That’ll give you a clue.

We enjoyed a herbal tea (Jen) and chocolate milkshake (guess). The chocolate milkshake was made with Betty’s own chocolate sauce. It was a very good milkshake, and tasted as though it was a very proper chocolate milkshake, for the discerning palate (no shortcuts taken). It was a bit intimidating, to tell you the truth. However, when Jennie was eating her Blackberry and Apple Pancakes she got that look that people get when their entire consciousness has been filled by the sensation currently exploding on their tongue. It doesn’t happen often with food for Jen, but it is quite amusing when it does. She completely loses her train of thought. With every bite…

A final special mention goes to the York Farmers’ Market. On the Friday the mall area was packed out with in the vicinity of sixty stalls selling produce of various kinds (mostly foodstuffs). Fruit and vegetables, cheeses, biscuits and cakes, and meat (including unplucked birds hanging off hooks—a new experience for me) tended to dominate. It will give you a sense of the fruit and vegetable situation around here in Oxford when I tell you that Jennie and I just looked at the healthy, fresh fruit and vegetables for several minutes and tried to work out if we could take it back with us. That’s never happened before on a holiday. The interesting thing however, was how much smaller the fruit and vegetables were, by and large, from their Australian cousins. They were like mini versions of things I’ve come to know in Australia. Maybe the size of the produce of the land is proportional to the size of the land that produces it? If so, I wonder how big things grow in America?

There were a couple of stalls cooking the meat products they were selling. The one that did the roaring trade was offering pig in bread. A whole pig cooked away over a spit, bits of it were cut off from time to time, put in between two slices of bread and sold, usually without anything else (especially not with anything that would look like a vegetable of any description. Just meat. And bread). Throughout the entire day, every time we walked passed the centre of town, the English were queued anywhere between ten and thirty deep in one long, polite, line to get their bit of pig. Often it was a family affair, with father and son queuing together and, from what I overheard as I walked passed, discussing the cooking pig in manly tones.

I don’t think I really grasped just how much the English are attached to pork until that moment, despite the huge amount of bacon and pork in the supermarkets (roughly on a par with the amount of lamb and beef in an Australian supermarket). One of our favourite fiction writers, an Englishman called Terry Pratchett wrote a book called Hogswatchnight set in a strange parallel world where the world really is on the back of a turtle supported by four elephants—a kind of parody of the Lord of the Rings genre. In his book, which is a thinly disguised parody of Christmas, Pratchett has Hogswatchnight be all about pig-related products. I had thought it was just an amusing detail. Now I realise he was putting the satirical knife into the heart of his own country’s taste buds. Quite delicious really.

It was at the Market that I discovered venison. Not discovered in the sense of ‘found out there was something in existence called venison.’ But discovered in the sense of trying some for the first time and being immediately converted. One of the stalls was selling venison burgers. And, as I may have indicated, I don’t mind a burger. So I tried a venison burger. I recommend it, it’s a bit like mildly spiced beef.

And yet again was the evidence of how widely different people’s tastes can be. I’m cautiously trying my first well cooked piece of venison meat. The guy after me takes the ‘venison and kidney’ option. The kidney is brought out. It’s in its own blood-filled sandwich bag. It’s purple. The gentleman says, “as rare as possible please.” And so this weird blue piece of meat is placed on the hotplate for maybe two minutes maximum.

I have come to like my beef steak rare. But there are limits. Some people, one suspects, would be happy to eat straight from the freshly killed animal. As long as the meat is just a bit above room temperature that’s ‘cooked’ for them. And kidney? Betty’s would never approve. MDB