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Pub review: Horsforth's Town Street Tavern
As pub chains go, they don't come much better than Market Town Taverns.
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The group is behind some of the best born-again alehouses in Yorkshire.
Places like Arcadia in Headingley, Muse in Wetherby, the Narrow Boat in Skipton and, my personal favourite, the Old Bell in Harrogate.
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To enter one of these is like taking a step back into time, back to the distressed-wood alehouses you sometimes find as life-size displays in folk museums. And while there are recognisable themes – handpainted signs in black and gold, archive advertisements, bare boards and wooden panelling – there is no manufactured 'look' here.
Each of the Market Town Taverns has its own character, rather than some cheerless design imposed to meet the company's corporate image.
So from the moment I walked through the door at the Town Street Tavern on Tuesday evening, and spotted the great line-up of beers along the bar, I knew I was in for a good time.
As befits any pub with the name 'Tavern' in the title, the range of ales here is quite excellent. Bar supervisor Lorna Osborne talked me through them: "We always do Black Sheep, Timothy Taylor's Best and Leeds Pale Ale, and we always have at least one beer from Copper Dragon. The other four beers change regularly."
The Market Town Taverns website makes great play of the brewers represented in their pubs, most of them small but determined independents from across the north. Rather than risk beers sitting around on the warehouse floor at third-party suppliers, MTT sources its ales directly from the brewer, and is supplied by companies in Yorkshire, Humberside, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Cumbria andDurham as well as one or two from Scotland.
The choice was predominantly Yorkshire beers when I called in at Horsforth, though there were a couple from west of the Pennines too.
And if eight real ales are not enough to whet your appetite, then how about a range of continental beers which includes Leffe, Warsteiner and Erdinger.
"We always do a fruit beer too," said Lorna, pointing me in the direction of the Bacchus Kriek, which at 4.20 a pint is probably best tried in halves.
The impressive list of draught beers is further augmented by a comprehensive bottled beer menu which offers pointers – and some tasting notes – to some of Europe's finest brews from Maisels Weiss to Bohemian Dark, Kuppers Kolsch to Kwak.
Bar snacks are available during the day, but in the evening, the upstairs brasserie restaurant serves good, wholesome, gastropub fare like a 10oz rump steak (13.95); grilled seabass (12.95); lamb, vegetable and dumpling casserole (10.95).
The restaurant is now taking bookings for Christmas too. Their 20-a-head three-course Christmas menu sounds good, and if you're feeling like celebrating 2009 in style, their 50 six-course 'Masterchef Evening' on New Year's Eve sounds interesting too.
My group of four sat in the window, but to be honest, we could have sat wherever we liked seeing as for a good hour from about 7pm we were the only people in the place, and Lorna was able to lean on one corner of her bar, reading the paper.
I wondered if it was the credit crunch that was keeping people away, but she was quick to offer re-assurance: "It's not usually as quiet as this, and it does tend to get busier after 9pm."
In a bid to pull in more families, the Town Street Tavern has just relaxed its "no children" rule, allowing well-behaved youngsters in the bar until 6pm and then until 9pm in the upstairs restaurant. But this was a school night, and there were none about.
"We're dog-friendly too," added Lorna as an afterthought. Which is nice to know, of course, but, unhelpfully, I didn't have one handy for her to be friendly to.
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