Rochdale - "Nutters"

[Harters]

This year’s north west “readers’ favourite” restaurant for the Good Food Guide. I’m unsure how a place gets nominated as a candidate for this or, more to the point, how votes are collected. Judging by the “thank you” posters in the place, I rather suspect the restaurant does a lot of lobbying of its customers and, being a big place, can lobby a lot of people.

That said, many customers will be very happy eating there, as we were. This is not cutting edge gastronomy but minor celeb. chef Andrew Nutter cooks good food at very reasonable prices in what could be a magnificent building – but isn’t. Wolstenholme Hall was built in the mid-19th century, probably for some local cotton magnate and spent the early part of the 20th century as a TB hospital. I don’t know its later use but the place now looks like one of the those 1980s pub internal refits that are entirely unsympathetic to the original building. But it’s still a place you could happily go for a celebration dinner or somewhere to take your great-aunt if she was planning to rewrite her will.

On entering, you come to a bar area reminiscent of a large boozer on the edge of a city centre which has, so far, escaped demolition. You’re shown to a table where you’re promised someone will take a drinks order. In their own time. There was a similar wait for menus. Getting on for twenty minutes had now passed. Menus arrive and we decide to go with the six course “surprise” menu – a good deal at £36 even if one course is coffee and petit fours. Front-of-house staff continued to be pretty clueless with a further delay in taking a wine order. Eventually a couple of canapés arrived – a mushroom flamiche and a “thai style chicken en croute”. Good mushroomy flavour on the flamiche. Chicken was chicken and the green gloop over it tasted of nothing in particular. And “en croute” does not mean stuck on a bit of bread.

Things bucked up considerably once we got into the dining room, both in service levels and food quality.

A tomato and sweet potato soup was excellent. A rich tomato flavour with the sweet potato adding to the sweetness of the tomato as well as providing the thickening. There were bread rolls – one with rosemary, the other topped with caraway seeds.

The first starter was a fine piece of hake, cooked just past translucent. Skin could have been crispier, though. It sat on a pea and lemon couscous with a roast pepper and pineapple dressing. We weren’t convinced by the pineapple. Good dish other than this.

Oddly, the second starter was also a fish course. The fillet of brill was, erm, brill. “Thai style” cropped again in the description of the coriander and lemon rice. And there was a coconut flavoured sauce which brought it all together quite well.

Main was a couple of slices of Tabley Brook beef fillet – well hung, very flavoursome and cooked rare. Alongside some caramelised red cabbage and a ramekin of underseasoned potato gratin . It’s mains like this that’ll have had folk voting for Nutters in their droves.

The choice then is cheese or dessert. We had a plate of each and shared. Cheese brought slices of five English and one French cheese – ranging from a disappointingly bland Kirkhams Lancashire, through a couple of blue Devon cheeses, to Stinking Bishop. The dessert plate also brought a selection – apple & almond frangipane; whimberry cheesecake (ohhh, this was good), blueberry ice cream, lemon posset and a strawberry tart.

Good coffee and underwhelming petit fours rounded off a very pleasant evening. Leaving aside the nonsense of the bar area, service in the restaurant itself had been good with dishes being explained to us by staff who seemed to know what they were about. Food costs had been £72; drinks and tip pushed this to £100 – which still made it one of the best value evenings we’ve had in a while.

[battleofthebulge]

Gosh.

A review of Nutters by Harters.

Perhaps you should also have invited Blowers and Aggers?

Explanation here for our foreign readers: Oxford-er

Sarah

[Harters]

A great disappointment, I know - but Nutter is his real name.

Whereas Harters was coined by my father in law, in similar vein to Aggers and Johnners. I now use it on all discussion boards except one, where I use my real name of Sharon Karensky.