UNTIL recently, your access to Scandinavian cuisine might’ve extended to a bit of Gravlax, the odd Daim or a few Köttbullar (that’s meatballs, to you and me; usually scoffed in the car park of the flat-pack furniture emporium you’d bought them from).
These moments of joy were frequent, but a little irregular
Nowadays though, it seems that every Leeds restaurant with an expense and Instagram account has been on a research-trip to Copenhagen; returning with bags of inspiration from the likes of Noma, Relæ and Grød (no we’ve no idea how to pronounce them either), and menus full of smoked and cured fish and meat, foraged herbs, and vegetables pickled, gelled and charred beyond their humble beginnings.
Having just celebrated their second birthday, Norse was one of the first restaurants to bring this style of cooking to Yorkshire.
Norse, BaltzersensI won’t give you an exhaustive rundown of everything I ate during the two and a half hour, nine-course tasting menu (I’ve already been bollocked about word counts), plus the menu is ferociously seasonal, so what I ate last week will be different to what you’ll eat next week. Still, I can give you an idea of the cooking you should expect, while dedicating a few words to gushing over things like puffed pork skin amuse bouche - a malleable, porcine prawn cracker, seasoned with a bittersweet dusting of leek ash.
Puffs and crackers and crisps show up in several dishes, brittle shards of dehydrated squid-ink add concentrated oceanic depth to cured mackerel and Jersey Royals - a hybrid somewhere between tartare and a raw hash - dressed with skyr yoghurt and pickled elderflower.
A frozen-yoghurt crisp studded with pearls of bee pollen is the second dessert - it has all the textural fun of eating jazzies from the pic & mix counter, then flavours of gooseberry and orange blossom remind you that you are, in fact, a grown adult, eating in an adult’s restaurant.
Mackerel tartare
Bee pollenNot all of the forays into chemistry experiments pay off though. Whitby crab, smoked mussels, pickled green strawberries and a turnip crisp (main image) was the culinary equivalent of the nightmare stag-do scenario in which you can’t wait to bring groups of your good friends together, only to realise they hate each other. The chamomile gel accompanying it did nothing but remind me of the time I accidentally brushed my teeth with face-wash. Of the nine courses I ate though, this was the only one that fell short of a triumph.
In addition to the more avant-garde (for Harrogate, at least) techniques, there’s a backbone of real technical skill; flakes of pan-fried cod shrug off the loin as seductively as a silk robe off the shoulder (not my shoulder, all the hair creates too much surface friction) and BBQ striploin of beef boasts a char better than many dedicated steakhouses. There’s a blood-red, smoked beetroot puree alongside it - a pastiche of the striploin’s blaze. This is “making a little go a long way” to an extent that’d instil envy in the most determined of wartime housewives.
These moments of joy were frequent, but a little irregular. Nine courses isn’t an easy feat to coordinate between the kitchen and front of house - especially for staggered sittings and when you’ve got an a la carte menu on at the same time - but inconsistent intervals between courses can really knock the atmosphere, especially when wines are served long before the course they’re intended to pair with.
BBQ StriploinI’m more than happy to give Norse the benefit of the doubt in this case, it’s still fairly recently since the original head chef, Murray Wilson, left and handed over the pans to Simon Jewitt, who’s proved himself to be well up to the job in terms of technical ability.
And it’s difficult to hold a grudge for minor issues when (unknown to us) they knocked 25% off the bill – something they’re doing on Tuesdays and Wednesdays (20% off) in order to spread visits throughout the week rather than bottlenecking them at the weekend.
Norse is one of those very modern restaurants that occupies a dual-purpose space. By day it’s Baltzersens Cafe, serving North Star coffee and very good Scandi-inspired breakfasts & lunches: cinnamon buns, curried herring, and, yes, meatballs. While 5pm might mark sundown and the end of the day in many Scandinavian countries, at Baltzersens it marks a brief respite.
Baltzersens’ daytime menu offers the familiar and dependable, with a touch of Euro refinement - to draw a comparison I’m certain they’re not sick of hearing, after three years serving Scandinavian cuisine, it’s the Ikea of the food world.
When they down tools and restart as Norse though, their manipulation of ingredients is pure Charles Eames - or at the very least, the more couture stuff from Habitat.
Norse at Baltzersens, 22 Oxford St, Harrogate HG1 1PU
Meal for 2, including wine and service : £150 (including 25% discount)
Rating: 15/20
Food: 8.5/10 - 8 out of 9 courses is an extremely high hit-rate
Atmosphere: 3/5 - Draping a restaurant over a coffee shop skeleton always feels a little like a supper club.
Service: 3.5/5 - Polite and helpful, but some timing issues with the tasting menu.
