Olive Branch, Marsden, West Yorkshire

[Harters]

This is a place which, instinctively, you know should be in the Good Food Guide. With equal good instinct, you have to question the 2009 Guide’s Cooking Score 4. Was the inspector being overly generous on his/her visit? Did we pick a bad night? It’s not that it’s bad it’s just that it’s perhaps trying too hard to be all things to all people and missing out in the process.

No longer a pub; this is a restaurant with rooms. But it’s an odd place. Furnishings are definitely the oddest factor. One room, presumably the original pub bit, looks like it’s been furnished by a visit to the local junk shop. I doubt whether there is a matching chair. The other room, presumably the original small restaurant, is mainly furnished with uncomfortable looking 1970s style banquettes, no doubt a canny wheeze to squeeze the odd extra bum on seat. This mismatch continues through to the menu which would benefit from simplification and a degree of clarity about cuisine. Certainly the number of items need reducing by a good 50% (perhaps more amongst the mains where fillet steak manages to put in no less than four separate appearances under slightly different guises – or twelve if the various different sauces that you could order with a steak are added in).

One menu starter was a “gateau” of Whitby crab and avocado. Yes, it’s one of those places that chuck in a foreign word now and again (like “assiette” and “flambé”). However, avocado was “off” but they could prepare a crab salad for my partner. Well, actually, no they couldn’t. They could prepare some pleasantly dressed leaves and a sort of moussey affair that had no discernable taste of crab.

She then had one of the fillet steak dishes. This was “rosettes” of beef (other offerings bring it in “medallions” and “strips” as well as just “steak”). It came, as described, in a brandy, cream and peppercorn sauce. Yep, it was peppered steak ( a 70s classic to go with the 70s style furnishings). Not bad. A tad miserly on the portion, particularly with a price tag of £18.95.

I might have fared a bit better. My starter was baked chorizo (or chirozo, as the menu twice had it), scallops, sundried tomato and olive oil. Tasted pretty good and would have been even better with a punchier chorizo. To eat it from its small dish, I was given a teaspoon and cake fork. Cute. Or not.

The main was a pot roasted chicken breast with sultanas, pine nuts and a sherry reduction. It’s not often I order chicken but I liked the sound of this and it tasted just as good. Some new potatoes and veg for both of us were in a separate bowl.

We both had “melting chocolate pots” as a dessert. A sort of fondant affair but really just melted chocolate with a bit of a crust. This was good. And improved still further by cindertoffee icecream – good toffee flavour.

The cinder toffee turned up in the piece along with decent cups of espresso.

So, not an awful place. And whoever is in the kitchen has some grasp of what’s what. And they get credit for having a decent array of wines by the glass. But the restaurant was let down by dreary, uncaring and dilatory service throughout. Staff would wander through the room not seeing that plates needed clearing or coffee orders needed taking. And the prime example was when we finally managed to attract the attention of one of three staff to order coffee, to be told “in a couple of minutes” – she was setting the tables for breakfast. It really does piss me off.

[Bapi]

Harters,

Now you are just makng me look bad. First the Mustard and Punch and now the Olive Branch- both over in my stomping ground and I have been to neither of them. Sadly I hear similar reports about the Olive Branch in that the prices have crept up over the last few years, but the food was deemed just reasonable but nothing special. I'll PM you a couple more local suggestions where an "assiete" or a "rosette" would be an anathema.

B