Melton's York

[Gary Marshall]

A rare saturday night out last week saw us venture into the city (of york) and to an old stalwart,and still imho, the best place to eat in the city centre, and rather embarrassingly for york, it's been that way since it open about 20 years ago, yes there's some good ethinic places now courtesy of akbars and red chilli but for a grown up dinner with proper cooking and a decent wine list you generally have to leave the town centre, if you want a choice of 20 mainly medicore italians though, it's the place.

A pre dinner drink in the unspoiled, rather good and i believe camra pub of the year 'the swan' saw a nice pint of copper dragon (i think) then a short ramble across the road-ish to meltons. By 8.30 the place was nicely buzzing, it's low lit and convivial and hums like a decent restaurant should.

As we had a birthday to celebrate we opened proceedings with a bottle of joseph perrier at £39, as usual, a nice drop. the starters were a little uninspiring for me comapred to previous visits but in the end a rather intruiging dish of courgette fritter, greek salad and scallops won the day, it was good but where the combo came from, i know not! With our starters we had a 05 grand cru riesling £33-ish i think.

Moving on to mains, after some very good bread - the focaccia in particular, most of us went for the rose veal with risotto , mrs m having a slow cooked rump steak with bearnaise (which i had a few weeks prevously), everyone seemed very happy with their choices, the veal was skillfully cooked risotto, fine it, all worked well and washed down with a NZ pinot noir £22 - the burgundies on the list were in absolute terms either a bit young or pricey and there's usually something interesting lurking on the list as michael hjort the owner and wife lucy are very serious about their wines, so it does pay to have a rummage rather than just paying up for a burg i find. they also suggest matches for all the mains as well which is a nice touch.

We added a couple of plates of cheese to share which saw 6 small slices of british cheeses and then onto deserts a damson frangipane, for me.

filter coffee and water is free and gratis so that finished off the evening, rolling into our taxi at somewhere near midnight, job done four sated and satisifed punters.