Late lunching at Oldroyd

I went to eat at Oldroyd this weekend. Finally.

Oldroyd is almost impossible to get a table at, thanks in part to insanely good reviews from the who’s who of restaurant critics, and partly due to the fact it doesn’t have all that many tables.

After a few failed attempts, we snared one for 3pm on a bank holiday Monday. Weird time. Full restaurant.

I don’t eat meat. The boyfriend doesn’t like fruit in savoury dishes. In the last two months I appear to have developed an allergy to shellfish. So, with all that taken into account, we ordered pretty everything left on the menu and told them to just bring it out as it came.

The advantage of not being able to eat quite a bit of the menu meant we ended up with a table of food we’d never normally order, bar the plate of heritage tomatoes, which I have ordered the last 12 times I’ve eaten out. No exaggeration.

Enforced experimentation turned out to be a great thing.

On principle, for instance, I never order mushroom risotto. During black tie season in London (how wanky does that sound?) it’s always the single vegetarian option and it’s always laden with garlic and butter, which is exactly what you want when you’re stuffed into a tight dress and being forced to make close conversation with absolute strangers on a round table. Right?

Anyway, ‘girolle, berkswell & Kentish cobnut risotto’ was the exact opposite of all that, and delicious for it. The crab and radishes on toast (which had a far fancier name, but I didn’t write it down) looked almost too pretty to eat. The ‘heritage tomato and green bean salad with béarnaise reduction’ (which I also didn’t write down, but still features on the sample menu on their website so that is indeed it’s proper name) was so good the boyfriend tipped the left over dressing onto his plate and soaked it up with zucchini frieds. There was skinny pasta with sardines and there was also chocolate splodge on a plate (officially, ‘chocolate mousse with salted pistachios and raspberries’) – basically my perfect dessert.

Three main courses, two sides, one dessert, a bottle of nice gavi, and a bill for £77. Three pm is the new brunch – you heard it here first.