The Magnificent Moorcock

To misquote Oscar Wilde: There is only one thing better than seeing your team start the season with an emphatic home win, and that’s to have dinner at the Moorcock Inn in the evening after the match. Two things could be better actually: the weather being the other.

To all the geography teachers who claim there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing, a late-summer afternoon at Turf Moor is the perfect riposte. This wasn’t rain, it was celestial waterboarding. Just as one squall blew itself out and a warming wind billowed round the James Hargreaves stand, some other force turned a freezing power-shower on your face. Awful, just awful, even by Burnley standards.

So sodden and shivering, I wend my way south through Todmorden towards Sowerby Bridge. Unlike Hebden Bridge, its more hipsterish Calder Valley neighbour a few miles up the road, it hasn’t yet been fully gentrified. So it still resembles Royston Vasey, the fictitious setting for BBC’s ‘League of Gentlemen’, complete with a set of locals that looks as if they’ve come to an open casting session.

The Moorcock Inn is perched high above the town on Norland Moor and bears an eerie resemblance to Tubbs & Edward’s ‘Local Shop’. But swing open the doors and there the similarity ends. Greeted by one of a squadron of highly-professional, beaming, well-scrubbed teenagers (they are probably older than that but I turned 56 the day before so everyone looks very young now), the bar area is packed with well-heeled locals amidst a fug of good food and conversation.

Aimee Turfood along with Alisdair Brooke-Taylor, the chef and part-time potter who fashions all of the ceramics they use, including making glazes from the ashes of charcoal used for cooking are the life-forces behind the restaurant. Ingredients are rigorously, obsessively local, homegrown and homemade. Wines and beers are European and organic. All of this is without any whiff of sermonising: it’s just about being both responsible and making fabulous tasting meals. A virtuous circle if ever there was one.

I’ve been a few times before and so know that this is one of the very few places anywhere in the world that sometime have the mythical Westvleteren 12, dubbed by some aficionado to be the best beer in the world. It’s made by the monks of the St. Sixtus Abbey in Flanders, close to Ypres. The monks also have a keen sense of brand marketing and understand there is nothing quite so desirable as something you can’t get, and so they restrict the supply to personal callers at the brewery and the cafe at the visitor centre. So it’s very rare and when it does appear outside of Belgium, it’s understandably expensive but, by god, is it worth it.

Dark with the merest hint of golden glow on the glass, the depth and complexity of malt, chocolate, caramel, raisins and, and, and...There’s so much going on here words can’t do it justice so we sip contentedly while studying tonight’s menu.

The Moorcock offers two menus; a series of dishes chalked on a board in the bar, most ranging from about £6 to £13 and a frequently-changing, no-choice option in the restaurant for £39 plus an optional drinks pairing for a further £34. I’ve had two of three things off the blackboard on mid-week visits and it’s quite brilliant, bar food elevated to a new level. I can understand why some might actually prefer this format, but we are of gluttonous intent, so it’s the full nine-yards with the drinks pairing for us this evening.

The ‘we’ in this context is my long-suffering motorcycling companion and, as he lives on the Fylde Coast, an occasional visitor to the ‘Cradle of Civilisation’ on Harry Potts Way with me. Given our age and demeanor, we are routinely mistaken in restaurants for a pair of bickering old queens. This annoys him and amuses me, so to protect his identity, I shall simply refer to him as ‘Pauline’.

Snacks of home-made charcuterie and from the garden, sweetcorn with a light spicy dusting, and giant runner beans, grilled so the pods open to the touch. Together with fabulous sourdough bread with orthodontically-challenging crust and rich, cultured butter, It’s like having regrown taste buds, all the natural flavours zinging through.

A chilled soup of courgette, fig leaf and basil, again absolutely exploding with flavour and goodness follows along with an unusually fragrant Austrian Gruner Veltliner. Most of this stuff that makes it over here tends to be very astringent, almost antiseptic tasting, but this has a rich roundness to it that is the result of the organic production technique that also lends it a slight cloudiness.

This helpful explanation is not mine but from one of the many staff who seem to know everything about everything and describe courses and drinks with genuine enthusiasm. They are versatile too, with no evidence of division of labour when it comes to serving, clearing and pouring. They all do whatever needs doing at any table and as a result, a full room is served a complex menu without missing a beat. They make it look easy but I’m sure it’s not.

Next, the tang of ozone from fresh, marinated mackerel with gherkin and home cured pork of which the only negative comment is there wasn’t nearly enough of it. I know this is neither big nor clever but this is food you don’t need to try to love, it’s just so immediate and welcoming and the body craves it. And to drink? How about a blush sparkling wine from Slovakia? A new one on me but an inspired choice with a bitter orangyness to it that works perfectly with the dish.

I can’t think of any restaurant that has quite such an invigorating ‘drinks’ pairings. Note that it’s not a ‘wine’ pairing even less so, a poncy ‘wine flight’, a term I find so irritating I never go back to any restaurant that uses it. In my past visits, accompaniments have been wine, beer and saki, whatever works best in context of what’s on the plate.

True to form then, the onion & rhubarb tart tartin with chicken parfait sauce and (slightly too few) pickled walnuts was humbling and served with a Belgian red ale that was more than a match for richness of this inspired combination.

Slow-cooked, 13-year old mutton with lava bread (edible seaweed) and lemon balm follows. This combo might not sound very appetising but faith is repaid as we fall silent, savouring the unctuous gaminess. It’s the only wine I would take slight issue with. While the Austrian Burgenland red is soft and mouth-filling, we both agree it doesn’t have quite enough of what’s called ‘helmet & throbble’ here in Essex, to cut through the richness of the meat. I would go for a filthy Cahors from Southwest France but Pauline thought a Croze-Hermitage from the Rhône might have done the job better, but then she does like her lighter wines. Either way, it’s a minor quibble.

We pass on the £10 cheese option. Writing this the day after, I’m annoyed we did that. I just know it would be memorable so next time it’s a must. Instead, we get the Cntrl-Alt-Delete on the tastebuds of a cooled mint & cucumber tea before two deserts: pineapple weed ice cream with tiny greengages and verbena flowers and then ‘Parkin’, the traditional sponge cake from these parts made with molasses, oatmeal and ginger served here with salted butter and honey. The Moscato d’Asti, a sweetish sparkler from Northern Italy washes it down and I’m delighted to say my prejudices about this wine are now partially reversed.

Time then for a cleansing ale while the taxi makes its way up the hill. Pauline opts for a pint of Tim Taylor while I try to remember what I had last time I was here. Aimee identifies it as St. Bernardus, another Belgian abbey beer. Aimee also suggests we try Tynt Meadow, from a British abbey so Pauline and I split one of these also before being carted back to town, mildly but exuberantly drunk.

The late AA Gill commented that a restaurant in Gorizia near the Italian/Slovenian border was like Orwell’s perfect pub ‘The Moon under Water’, insofar it was so perfect, that it may not actually exist at all, but instead was “a phantasmagoria conjured up by urban daydreams”.

The Moorcock Inn is my Moon under Water but very much of the here-and-now. A proper pub serving imaginative food that never loses sight of the fact that imagination is never a substitute for taste and the provenance of ingredients. This is about as good as it gets in my book. And if Burnley can stuff Southampton the same day, so much the better.

Dinner for two £181 excluding service but with quite a lot of pricey drink. More sensible folk would probably save about £30 on this.

The Moorcock Inn, Moorbottom Lane, Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire HX6 3RP Telephone: 01422 832103