Nineteen
Location: Grape Lane, Swinegate
Average Meal Price: £25 (set menu inc. wine)
In the run-up to Christmas, Will and I decided that dinner at Nineteen was the way to go. We took the girls along to avoid looking too much like conspirators or a couple.
Now, I won’t deny we forked out for this one. If you cannot comprehend paying £15 for a main course and you think that the whole economic register of the restaurant business is just unreasonable (and you may be right), don’t punish yourself. On a student budget the price is very rarely right and if you think you’re being ripped off, naturally, you won’t enjoy your meal.
And there’s no shame in that. I would not enjoy, for example, being forced to flog lesser-known inner organs to stump up the funds for some laboured, ever-waning designer-label zip-top, replete with ‘hoodie’ and one of those bombastic numerical logos that looks like it’s been stitched on by a 4-year-old. For all these reasons and more, I never shop at Abercrombie and Fitch.
I prioritise food. If you, like me, invest frequently, heavily and unflinchingly in your appetite, you will find Nineteen delightful. All four of us went with the Christmas set menu - three courses for less than £20! Mine was the curried parsnip soup with croutons - iceberglike in their not-quite-total immersion - bobbing happily across the ample surface. It was unsurpassable and, I thought, typified the very inclusive nature of British food, not hesitating to ‘curry’ as High English a vegetable as the parsnip.
For the main I had grilled salmon and “spinach crushed potato” in a chive butter sauce. The salmon was pink, sleek and delicious and the sauce complementary. We were for a long time entirely mystified by the spinach crushed potato; the complete absence of any punctuation on the menu had made it difficult to know what would be crushing what, and in what quantities. It turned out not to matter very much; however constructed, the standard template for potato accompaniments had been vastly improved upon.
I am reminded at this point of a lamb shank I ate once in Oxfordshire. The potatoes on that occasion (mashed, as it so happened) had been enlivened with squat gargoyles of black pudding; I remember them crouching darkly between waves of mash, seething…
Our companions ordered bloody steaks; I think they were trying to impress us. When they arrived I was startled to see that the steaks were actually rare – a rare thing to behold in North Yorkshire, where any meat that hasn’t been scalded to within an inch of the gates of Hell is commonly regarded with a mixture of suspicion and disgust.
A word about the ambience: once upon a time, 19 Grape Lane, a higgledy-piggledy, early Tudor affair, was a brothel. Grape Lane is apparently a corruption of ‘Grope Lane’ – but the incumbent proprietor and chef has gone some way to improving the restaurant’s image. The furniture, though powerfully modern, sits comfortably beneath the beamed ceiling; the plates are huge and white; we even had one of those pressure-sensitive table lamps which cycles through four different degrees of brightness when you touch the base – so the girls had something to play with when their attention started to drift from the conversation.
