Let’s go Home – review of Home restaurant, Leeds

By Lee-J Walker, joint managing director of TheBusinessDesk.com

Stepping out of the taxi outside the Leonardo Hotel, both my guest Johnny Abraham and I said the same thing: “I’ve not been down here for about a decade.”

Home restaurant now has its home at the venue frequented by many night owls in the noughties – The Oracle which was once the Tetley museum.

Home launched with a big bang in 2017 from its original home on Kirkgate.

The area it now occupies was once the slick new area of Leeds and the club and bars there were the coolest in the city by far, alongside the superb Calls Landing Hotel and Brasserie 44 & Pool Court.

And as for the aforementioned club there, The Oracle, you even had to have a platinum membership card to get in!

Sadly in recent years it seems to have lost its appeal with the loss of bar and club life as kids don’t seem to party like they did in the nineties… or do they? How would I know, I’m too old for that malarkey now.  I’m sure they do of course but I prefer the nice restaurants of course these days.

It was certainly a sad day for Leeds when Brasserie 44 closed.

Elizabeth Cottam

Now though, the area is having new life breathed into it with the huge South Bank development, Aire Park, in progress;  the Tetley being modernised; a 400-bed hotel due to open and 850 new homes in the first phase alone scheduled to be built.

So the choice of location is a wise decision and it was lovely to see this restaurant bringing style to this spot once again.

Cool it is, with a bauhaus noir style going on, it’s dark, very dark, clean and sharp too. I like it. I felt on entering that I’d left Yorkshire and arrived in a cool Berlin restaurant or something.

We were trying out their new 10-course Signature taster menu which was launched in January by Leeds iconic chef Elizabeth Cottam. This menu is named ‘Stuck in the past’. This is somewhat like my dress sense nowadays, unlike my fashionista days at Oracle when I was five stone lighter and where I’d don Prada slip-ons and a Hugo Boss biker jacket and think I’d just stepped off a catwalk.

Stuck in the past is a reference to the best dishes Liz has enjoyed, although I must say it is not stuck in the past whatsoever. The food reflected the restaurant’s ambiance – chic and contemporary.

This included a limber upper of potato bread with maple and sage butter followed by a butternut squash, amaretto course and perfectly beautiful black pudding, pistachio and plum snacks which all brimmed with loud flavours.

These first courses set the tone and we worked our way to the roasted onion consommé, thyme with a comte dumpling. This course was paired with a Vincent Stoeffler, Sylvaner, Alsace, France which presented its own onion notes. The amazing trick here was that following a taste of the consommé, flavours of apples came through with the pale yellow unfiltered wine. It was perfect.

We briskly moved to liver parfait with a bit of foie gras complemented by a strong, sharp Dominio Basconcillios, Tempranillo, Ribera del Duero. I’ve always been a big offal fan, especially liver, and I’ve never had a pate or parfait presented like this but it worked so well.

I saw the baked Alaska mid-way through the experience when I ran through the menu at the start of the evening and thought, ‘that’s quirky’. The proof is surely in ‘the eating of the pudding’ and having an ice cream baked Alaska with Porcini and Black Trompette, black garlic and sherry certainly is quirky. But my goodness, what a masterpiece it was.

However, the following course was a showstopper and was my favourite dish of the night. The fish course. A crab kyiv with a whopping dollop of Exmoor Imperial Oscietra Caviar. This crunchy coating housed beautiful white crab meat and the saltiness of the caviar complemented it perfectly. It was washed down with a Scicilian Alessandro Viola, Note de Bianco. This was a perfectly sized portion but my greedy side wanted another – Johnny agreed! We loved this.

I also am becoming a fan of Exmoor caviar, as this was the third time in the last few weeks I’ve consumed some!

We enjoyed sticky pork belly with pickled celeriac and then a melted cheese course with kind of a flapjack and then a nice salted caramel banana dessert to end.

Overall, this was a very enjoyable experience. Without a doubt, for those very special occasions or for when you deserve some good solid indulgence and luxury – I highly recommend. Please do visit.

This restaurant is something Leeds and Yorkshire should be proud of. I will return very soon with Mrs Walker as I am keen to ‘go Home’ again.