We were thrilled with a recent review in Waitrose Food Illustrated, by Nikki Smith, which highly recommended our vegetarian menus.
“Generally vegetarian food in restaurants is bulky and fatty and you can usually predict what you’ll be offered: risotto, goat’s cheese, something with Halloumi. Thus, there is a danger that when presented with an interesting meat-free menu one is so grateful that all criticism is suspended. But even with my analytical faculties fully functioning, I was delighted with Northcote Manor.
Chef Nigel Haworth has been working at Northcote, which he co-owns, for 20 years. Together with Gardener Andrew Mellom, Haworth has developed a garden that bursts with produce on which his dishes are based. During my meal, I actually saw a chef sprint to the plot and return with something leafy!
Northcote offers a full vegetarian menu beside its conventional one and, in addition there’s the set five-course gourmet vegetarian menu (£40) that I chose.
The joy of Haworth’s meat-free cooking is its immediacy and freshness, and the complete lack of veggie clichés. Instead I feasted on gorgeous, delicate food: an amuse bouche of crushed broad beans in a pastry shell with a basil dip; delicate baby fennel with a paprika cream; a cauliflower cheese soufflé that captured the essence of the classic combination, but made it light as air; the most intense and silky carrot and coriander soup I’ve ever tasted, local asparagus; wild berries and some very interesting cheese, including Blacksticks, a buttery local blu. You can choose a well recommended wine to accompany each course; the mouth filling Concha y Toro Gewurtztraminer, which matched up to the cauliflower cheese, was particularly memorable.
Haworth is frank “Vegetarians are grumbled about by chefs, but that’s because vegetarian food is difficult to do well” I’m not sure whether that’s true, but Haworth certainly knows what he’s doing. Rather than just dropping the meat out of a dish and replacing it with cheese, he starts from the ingredients up, combining them in creative and delicious ways.