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shewhomust) wrote2023-04-05 01:00 pm
shewhomust) wrote2023-04-05 01:00 pm
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Lunch at Coarse
Coarse describes itself as a "tasting menu restaurant in Durham city centre" and we have been curious to try it since it opened in the autumn (press coverage here). So when J. suggested taking us out to lunch as a birthday treat (midway between durham_rambler's birthday and mine), that's where we suggested, and she very generously agreed.
It's in Reform Place, which sounds grander than it is: it's a little courtyard off the North Road (once a main shopping street, now in limbo while the bus station is being rebuilt). At the far end of the courtyard is the Head of Steam, a pub with a good reputation, in a building which was once the gardening department of Archibalds:
This picture doesn't really convey the enclosed nature of the space. It wouldn't have taken much effort to falsify it still further, by cropping out the edge of the dustbin - but a gaggle of dustbins do dominate the space, evidence of how all the premises above shops are being converted into student flats (not in itself a bad thing)...
Coarse operates on the basis of a single tasting menu: you can have four courses or all six, you can add a supplementary course (fish pie) to either of those, you can choose your wine from the list or order a sequence of wines paired with the food - or you can drink water, as J did because she had to drive home (so I paid for the wine, which seemed only fair). Behind these options lies a single, seasonal menu, a sequence of small, tasty things. We went for the six dishes, with paired wines. Short version: everything was very - well, since I read Zoe Williams on why you can't describe food as tasty, I have had this terrible urge to do just that. Someone quoted on their website says "Had the best meal of my life, the leek and potato is going to haunt my dreams." I enjoyed myself very much, but nothing I ate is going to haunt my dreams. It was all just very tasty.
We started with "Snacks" which turned out to be, in the first place, bread - two different kinds of bread, one sourdough, one dark and treacly, served with two different spreads, very smooth and creamy, subtly flavoured. In hindsight, having tasted those, I should have put the bread aside for later. Possibly this was the intention, because the first glass of wine didn't appear until the next snack:
Which turned out to be a chunk of - lamb, I think - smothered in a mildly curried, citrussy sauce, and sprinkled with something crunchy (our server probably told us what that was, but I missed it). I would never have thought of serving that with fizz (crémant du Jura), but it worked. I thought this was the least successful course of the meal, three interesting flavours which didn't clash but didn't enhance each other: J said it was her favourite...
Next came something called "Spring Forward" (really?): a perectly poached egg on a nest of greenery, herbs and tiny asparagus tips and such. This was when I wished I had saved the sourdough bread; later I also wished I had asked for salt and pepper. Still, asparagus season is coming ... Pastrami salmon was not, as I expected, some sort of smoked salmon, but a little filled of cooked salmon, with pastrami spices (coriander in particular) served with wafer-thin slices of radish.
This is "Pork - Shire", the busiest plate of the meal: a bite of roast pork, a smear of bright yellow vegetable puree, a shard of crackling, a chunk of bacon on a bed of cabbage in a pool of (slightly over-salted?) gravy, a finger of black pudding accompanied by a blob of rhubarb purée... And here is my problem with this sort of dining: I want more. Not because the meal as a whole left me hungry: far from it. But each combination of flavours here made me want to try again: what is that vegetable, exactly? how would the rhubarb work with the bacon? do I recognise Broom House Farm's black pudding?... I also wondered how this selection would work with a white Alsace wine. It was actually accompanied by the only red wine of the selection, a 2006 Rioja, and again, while I was pleased to change to red, and enjoyed the wine itself, I didn't think the pairing transformed either the wine or the food.
Time for pudding:
"Cake & Custard" turns out to be more rhubarb, hurray, hidden under a froth of custard, just visible in the rosy pink of the madeleine which was my favourite thing of the whole meal, buttery and crisp, the tartness of the fruit not quite lost. From the sublime to the ridiculous:
This is called "Malteaster" - have they really bought this set of dishes in order to serve dessert for one brief season of the year? It's an Easter egg, but specifically, it's what you get if you set out to do a Cadbury's creme agg right: rich chocolate ganache wrapped around a creamy whote and a splash of vibrant passion fruit for the yolk. Serve with Rutherglen muscat, obviously. It's silly and delightful.
A shot of espresso fortifieddurham_rambler for the walk home, J and me for a tour of the North Road's charity shops, the perfect end to -
Well, look, here's the thing: I've been quite critical about the experience, but that doesn't mean I wasn't enjoying myself, it just means that being critical is aa majoe part of how I enjoy myself. I would certainly do it again. The food was good, but the entertainment was even better.
durham_rambler's birthday and mine), that's where we suggested, and she very generously agreed. It's in Reform Place, which sounds grander than it is: it's a little courtyard off the North Road (once a main shopping street, now in limbo while the bus station is being rebuilt). At the far end of the courtyard is the Head of Steam, a pub with a good reputation, in a building which was once the gardening department of Archibalds:
This picture doesn't really convey the enclosed nature of the space. It wouldn't have taken much effort to falsify it still further, by cropping out the edge of the dustbin - but a gaggle of dustbins do dominate the space, evidence of how all the premises above shops are being converted into student flats (not in itself a bad thing)...
Coarse operates on the basis of a single tasting menu: you can have four courses or all six, you can add a supplementary course (fish pie) to either of those, you can choose your wine from the list or order a sequence of wines paired with the food - or you can drink water, as J did because she had to drive home (so I paid for the wine, which seemed only fair). Behind these options lies a single, seasonal menu, a sequence of small, tasty things. We went for the six dishes, with paired wines. Short version: everything was very - well, since I read Zoe Williams on why you can't describe food as tasty, I have had this terrible urge to do just that. Someone quoted on their website says "Had the best meal of my life, the leek and potato is going to haunt my dreams." I enjoyed myself very much, but nothing I ate is going to haunt my dreams. It was all just very tasty.
We started with "Snacks" which turned out to be, in the first place, bread - two different kinds of bread, one sourdough, one dark and treacly, served with two different spreads, very smooth and creamy, subtly flavoured. In hindsight, having tasted those, I should have put the bread aside for later. Possibly this was the intention, because the first glass of wine didn't appear until the next snack:
Which turned out to be a chunk of - lamb, I think - smothered in a mildly curried, citrussy sauce, and sprinkled with something crunchy (our server probably told us what that was, but I missed it). I would never have thought of serving that with fizz (crémant du Jura), but it worked. I thought this was the least successful course of the meal, three interesting flavours which didn't clash but didn't enhance each other: J said it was her favourite...
Next came something called "Spring Forward" (really?): a perectly poached egg on a nest of greenery, herbs and tiny asparagus tips and such. This was when I wished I had saved the sourdough bread; later I also wished I had asked for salt and pepper. Still, asparagus season is coming ... Pastrami salmon was not, as I expected, some sort of smoked salmon, but a little filled of cooked salmon, with pastrami spices (coriander in particular) served with wafer-thin slices of radish.
This is "Pork - Shire", the busiest plate of the meal: a bite of roast pork, a smear of bright yellow vegetable puree, a shard of crackling, a chunk of bacon on a bed of cabbage in a pool of (slightly over-salted?) gravy, a finger of black pudding accompanied by a blob of rhubarb purée... And here is my problem with this sort of dining: I want more. Not because the meal as a whole left me hungry: far from it. But each combination of flavours here made me want to try again: what is that vegetable, exactly? how would the rhubarb work with the bacon? do I recognise Broom House Farm's black pudding?... I also wondered how this selection would work with a white Alsace wine. It was actually accompanied by the only red wine of the selection, a 2006 Rioja, and again, while I was pleased to change to red, and enjoyed the wine itself, I didn't think the pairing transformed either the wine or the food.
Time for pudding:
"Cake & Custard" turns out to be more rhubarb, hurray, hidden under a froth of custard, just visible in the rosy pink of the madeleine which was my favourite thing of the whole meal, buttery and crisp, the tartness of the fruit not quite lost. From the sublime to the ridiculous:
This is called "Malteaster" - have they really bought this set of dishes in order to serve dessert for one brief season of the year? It's an Easter egg, but specifically, it's what you get if you set out to do a Cadbury's creme agg right: rich chocolate ganache wrapped around a creamy whote and a splash of vibrant passion fruit for the yolk. Serve with Rutherglen muscat, obviously. It's silly and delightful.
A shot of espresso fortified
durham_rambler for the walk home, J and me for a tour of the North Road's charity shops, the perfect end to - Well, look, here's the thing: I've been quite critical about the experience, but that doesn't mean I wasn't enjoying myself, it just means that being critical is aa majoe part of how I enjoy myself. I would certainly do it again. The food was good, but the entertainment was even better.