TIME was when the trudge up towards the city’s cathedrals was rewarded with a sip of altar wine or a suck on a communion wafer.
These days, the appetite-heightening climb from Berry Street affords a more comprehensive food and drink offer and, all of a sudden, a good time is possible in umpteen restaurants that end of town – Puschka, 60 Hope Street, The Quarter, The Art School, The Old Blind School (reviewed here), and more. A host indeed.
Now, with the paint barely dry, you can add The Buyers Club, so new they hadn't even got round to putting their name over the door. Either that or they were way too cool for anything as tediously conventional as signage.
With a gorgeous oyster jus, crispy oyster, crispy onions and perfect scoop of truffle mash, beef and oyster is an accomplished, flawless dish
Which figures since one of those behind the venture is Sam Tawil, owner of Bold Street Coffee, as laid back as a place can get when it’s in the business of dispensing stimulants.
Why the name? A buyers club is about the collective purchasing power of its members so maybe it’s a little in-joke among the stakeholders – along with Tawil there are chefs Daniel Heffy and Michael Harrison, club night promoter Andrew Hill and Urban Splash architect Miles Falkingham.
There is the added benefit, via box office hit film The Dallas Buyers Club, of being in the moment, though a rethink may be required when it turns up on ITV4.
This place has history: until 2004 it housed The Flying Picket, a significant part of the Liverpool live music scene for a couple of decade and The Buyers Club incorporates a new, first floor, music venue.
Sharing top billing here is the food, to be found at ground level via a newly-added glass and steel entrance – more call centre than hipster joint, but don’t let that put you off.
Wine is something else they take seriously here; enough to have lured their West Kirby-born sommelier back from the bright whites of London. Much emphasis is placed on pairing food with wine and, if our knowledgeable young server is to judge by, the keeper of the corkscrew is making his presence felt.
Behind the bar’s handsome, all-wood counter, the same sturdy timber supports bottled vintages in cases running floor to ceiling and nearly the length of the room. Elsewhere, there are stripped boards, functional tables and chairs, a chalkboard crowded with wines, and a couple of walls from which the plaster has been mostly removed, leaving little bits clinging to the bare brick. It’s what those in the know call fashionably distressed, and those not in the know call half a job.
Beer boardThis Sunday lunchtime, it’s putting Mrs Grill in mind of the Old Everyman Bistro. There is a gentle hum around the place, and it’s nothing to do with the two babies, accompanied by their parents, at a neighbouring table.
A restaurant kitchen in its infancy will inevitably experience teething troubles, which is why we do not normally rush to judge them. But this time the menu was too tantalising to resist. On that basis, such trifling irritations as there were – an intended starter arriving with the mains, a pastry base a little scorched at the edge, – should be attributed to a mild case of precocious dentition.
One other problem, not of the kitchen’s making, concerns the coffee, elaborately prepared and served in a glass flask of the sort to be found in Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory and producing a character which, if not monstrous exactly, was thin and rather sour.
Sam, the coffee man, knows his subject inside out and is a nice chap to boot so it pains me to mention this. I suspect the issue is not of sourcing but preparation; maybe the grind, maybe water temperature, maybe the filter method – I am a convert to the belief that only pressure can extract the best from the beans.
Heffy and Harrison between them bring stints at the Carriage Works, Art School and Italian Club Fish and together are earning quite the reputation running the pop-up restaurant that is their Secret Diners Club.
At The Buyers Club, mains comprise three fish/seafood dishes, three vegetarian and three meat, in that order, but with equal attention applied to all. Sure, there is other stuff like meat and cheese boards, but a menu with fig tarte tatin and smoked pork with salt-baked pineapple points to a determination to be different.
Beef and oysterThe “beer board” (£9) contains gently pickled strips of carrot and pearl onion; babaganoush; scotch egg that needs a little perking up; and a good sausage roll, stuffed with minced pork, a dash of fillet and black pudding.
Cheese and Onion Crumble (£6) comes as a lush, melting tangle of Mrs Kirkham’s creamy Lancashire and onion encased in excellent shortcrust, soft and crumbly in the right places.
Octopus Pill Pil (£9) is a jumble of soft, meaty tentacles braised with olive oil, lemon, slivers of garlic, chilli, halved cherry tomatoes, and some dark magic to produce a dish of warmth and complexity that cannot be accounted for by those simple ingredients alone.
Beef and Oyster (£12), made with ox cheek, only recently back on menus post-BSE, has been braised for what must have been about a week and a half to render flesh tough-as-logger-boots to a richly-flavoured gelatinous wad which dissolves on contact with the gastric juices: proof of patience’s virtue. With a gorgeous oyster jus, crispy oyster, crispy onions and perfect scoop of truffle mash, it is an accomplished, flawless dish.
Wonderfully unassuming “chips and gravy” (£4) should at the very least be called “gravy and chips”, insisted Mrs Grill. The chips are good, the gravy sensational: stocky, oak-hued, multi-layered, concentrated, it would grace any meal.
Cheese and onion pieA slightly thicker consistency may have allowed more gravy to cling on. No matter, when the chips ran out, we took spoons to it. Had there not been 16 other people in the room, I would have slurped the remnants straight from the bowl.
For dessert, we ate the babies. And why not? They were lovely, after all. A cross between a pancake and a Yorkshire pudding, Dutch babies (£5) were served straight out of a cast iron frying pan with slices of just-soft pear and some brilliant gingerbread ice cream they had whipped up in the kitchen that day.
If you crave something other than steaks, burgers, duck breast and Goosnargh bloody chicken, the boys in The Buyers Club kitchen could be the answer to a prayer. Praise the Lads.
NB: All scored Confidential reviews are paid for by the company, never the restaurant or a PR outfit. Critics dine unannounced and their opinions are completely independent of any commerical relationships.
The Buyers Club (BEHIND the Old Blind School)
24 Hardman Street,
L1 9AX.
Tel. 0151 709 2400.
Rating: 17/20
Food 8.5/10
Service 4/5
Ambience 4.5/5
Venues are rated against the best examples of their kind: gastropubs against the best gastropuns, takeaways against the best takeaways, etc. On this basis, the scores represent....
1-5: Straight into the dog bowl
6-9: Straight into the Iceland
10-11: In an emergency
12-13: If you happen to be passing
14-15: Worth a trip out
16-17: Very good to exceptional
18-20: As good as it gets
