If I said the words ‘municipal catering’, you would probably recoil in horror. So what I am about to tell you is something of a miracle: a new restaurant has opened in Rochdale Town Hall, and it’s jolly good.
Over the past three years, the Town Hall has been the subject of a multi-million pound restoration funded by The National Lottery and other sources. Built in 1871 and Grade I listed, it has been restored to its late Victorian splendour and is, to be frank, astonishing.
Along with the building restoration, manager of strategy operations Caroline Storr was charged with managing the ‘people’ side of the regeneration, and part of that was opening a restaurant. In these days of tight budgets and outsourcing, Storr could have been forgiven for heading straight for a big catering operation. But she took a different route. Determined to keep it in-house and a proper Rochdale enterprise, she took on Tristan Welch, a restaurant consultant. And off they went.
Beef wellington. Photo by Fiona Finchett.
Welch is no slouch when it comes to restaurants. A chef who worked at Le Gavroche and whose CV glitters with names like The French Laundry as well as head chef at Gordon Ramsay’s Petrus, he went on to run restaurants of his own. This all sounds very impressive but there are a lot of decisions when opening a new place to eat. What level is the venue pitched at? Will there be tablecloths? What does the room look like? How many covers are there? And, of course, who will the big name be? Who will be chef?
Enter local boy Darren Parkinson. Born in Rochdale, this classically trained chef has worked in Paris and London. Most recently, he was at the award-winning Shibden Mill in Halifax and at The Fleece Inn in Ripponden. Suffice to say, he knows what he’s doing.
Between them, Storr, Welch and Parkinson have created a rather good restaurant. Situated on the ground floor of the Town Hall, you get to it by the front door and the entrance hall, a beautiful space with Arabic vaulting. The room itself is quiet and decorated in dark colours, with tables on the floor around a central service bar and booths for four (or six at a push) along one wall. The service is charming, young, and eager, if a little inexperienced, but they’ll get that soon enough.
As for the food, we went on Press Night when there was a set menu. Carnivores were served mackerel and Whitby crab mousse, a filet of beef wellington, and a sticky toffee pudding or ice cream, and one of our people ate some delicious blue cheese of uncertain origin. Veggies were served butternut squash soup, cauliflower steak, and the same puddings.
Cauliflower steak. Photo by Fiona Finchett and courtesy of Rochdale Council.
The mackerel and crab mousse was as light as could be and was served with croutons and little sticks of pickled cucumber, as well as green zingy dots of apple which had been put through some piece of catering magic and set the mousse off beautifully. The soup was smooth and butternutty and had a rather interesting savoury dock pudding which my partner insisted on eating in its entirety, so I can’t comment. But he liked it.
The pastry round the Lee Horsley beef filet was crisp, no mean feat when you’re serving 40 people and keeping it warm, and the beef melted in the mouth. The plating looked a little odd, with two small hasselback potatoes and a couple of chunks of carrot, but they were exceedingly tasty. Incidentally, Lee Horsley ran Frosts in Chorlton, the best commercial butcher in the North West, until he gave it up and moved the operation to his farm. The company supplies Hawksmoor. Nuff said.
Meanwhile, the cauliflower steak was exactly the right level of crunchy, but I thought disappointingly small compared to the beef. As for the puddings, the sticky toffee chap was excellent, not too sweet and very sticky, and the ice cream definitely wasn’t shop-bought.
The Martlet Kitchen is open every day (except Sunday) for brunch from 10am to 2pm, lunch from 12pm to 4pm, and a good-looking afternoon tea is available from 12pm until 3.30pm as long as you book 24 hours in advance. Dinner bookings are on Friday and Saturday from 5.30pm to 8.30pm. You can see the menus on the website below. If anything, they are more ambitious than the food we were given, and that was very good.
Darren Parkinson, Caroline Storr, Tristan Welch. Photo by Fiona Finchett and courtesy of Rochdale Council.
Everyone involved in this venture is to be congratulated, especially Rochdale Council for having the bottle to become restaurateurs when the only pay structures they had at the start were for dinner ladies, and Caroline Storr for taking her brief and running with it to such a high standard. I just hope there is enough money in Rochdale to keep them rolling, although with a dinner that good at £35 for three courses, I shall definitely be going back, and picking up a tour of the town hall on the way. The building alone is worth the journey, and the food is the icing on the cake.
In case you were wondering, the Martlet is a mythical bird which appears on the Rochdale coat of arms. It has no feet, so can never land. It is born on the wing and dies on the wing, and is a symbol for continuous effort, a perpetual keepy-uppy approach to life much favoured by the Victorians.
All photos by Fiona Finchett, including the main image, and courtesy of Rochdale Council
