Nord, Liverpool: ‘It's very much a win'

The Guardian

01-03-2025

Nord, 100 Old Hall St, Liverpool L3 9QJ. Snacks £6.50-£11; small plates 315.50-£27, large plates £20-£36, desserts £11-£16, wines from £32
A midweek night and the restaurant is completely empty. Music thrums and staff drift about looking purposeful, despite being a little short on purpose until we show up. This has nothing to do with Nord and everything to do with football. At the exact time of our booking, Everton are kicking off against Liverpool, two miles away at Goodison Park, for what has been described to me as not just a game, but the game. As well as being a local derby, it's also the last ever match to be played between the two at the stadium before Everton move to their new home at Bramley-Moore Dock. Even a blithering football ignoramus like me can recognise the significance of such a game to a city like Liverpool and why that might suppress bookings.
On the upside, the emptiness provides a serious opportunity to perv over the design of the restaurant, tucked into the ground floor of one of Liverpool's most famous buildings. Now called the Plaza, it's a vast 60s block twice as long as it is high, which was once the headquarters of clothing catalogue company Littlewoods. The foyer has been given a sleek polished marble makeover to play up its 60s origins, with a few appropriate swirls of colour. The bar and dining room behind takes all that a little further. There are olive-green banquettes and bucket chairs, huge upside-down bowl-shaped ceiling lamps, peach-coloured fascias and, along one side, booths tucked into smooth, curving caves. It's part Austin Powers shag palace, part Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars. It really is groovy, baby.
For GSG Hospitality, owners of various businesses across the northwest, the design has adaptability. It could become almost anything they want it to be. For now, however, it very much suits the cooking of Liverpool-born Daniel Heffy, who returned here in 2022 after years in Stockholm, including a lengthy stint at the three Michelin-starred Frantzen. At Nord, he insists he looks northwards for inspiration, hence the name, but if so, he does that without being annoyingly doctrinaire or earnest. Or especially northern. The imperative to feed clearly trumps geography every time.
Among the snacks, many a raucous celebration of the deep-fat fryer, there are shredded-duck croquettes with a lip-smackingly sour plum sauce. It's a butch riff on crispy duck with pancakes. There's a bowl of deep-fried olives flavoured with rosemary and lemon, which rustle against each other when you shake the bowl. A magnificently engineered quail Scotch egg, the meaty casing flecked with green herbs, comes with a smooth, sweet aïoli of roasted garlic. You could get kicked out of the New Nordic clubhouse for daring to allow racy, sunkissed things like olives, lemons and that wantonly promiscuous bulb garlic into your kitchen. And yet here they are, amid culinary ideas from higher latitudes; the sort that have watched the gloomy films of Ingmar Bergman and have opinions on them.
The result is a restaurant that manages to be ambitious without being overbearing. Ambition, of course, is risky because it may not always be realised. That's the case here. But I'd much prefer Heffy's slight misses than the unambitious hits of safer cooks. Because when he gets it right, my heart simply beats faster. His steak tartare is made extra beefy with the addition of what he calls a 'tallow emulsion', as against an olive oil-based dressing from southern climes. Give him extra points for employing the word tallow, associated with the harsh soaps used to clean up filthy Dickensian urchins, rather than for dinner. The beef-fat dressing does boost the flavour. But it's the inclusion of squeaky macadamia nuts from that bit of the north called Australia which are the gamechanger, adding texture. The tartare is topped with a generous fall of microplaned parmesan, and on top of that are rounds of pickled vegetables. We are back in the north, and here, pickling rules. Against that a warm chawamushi or set savoury custard, topped with king crab and smoked eel, stutters a little. It works texturally, but it's a tricky dish to get right, as this one proves. It is simply oversalted.
Today, the larger plates include a slab of seared monkfish on a glossy fish roe and chive cream sauce of a sort guaranteed to make a lachrymose Finn weep gently with joy. But it's completely overshadowed by a plate of chicken, both roasted and deep fried, with quenelles of mushroom duxelles on a fermented mushroom sauce tasting intensely of itself. The monkfish is pretty. The mushroom and chicken dish just elbows its way to the front of the crowd, waving and hollering. It's dinner with a capital D. Alongside that, for carbs, there are new potatoes, crisply roasted and squished until bursting from their skins, then drenched in garlic butter. There are also roasted baby carrots, which would have been terrific by themselves. But they come with bouquets of greens which, in a Nordic manner, have been seasoned with vinegar, just a little too stridently. The carrots are sweet. The greens demand we pucker up. That's fine. Let's just eat the carrots.
At the bottom of the dessert menu, after the blood-orange tart with chocolate ice-cream and the almond, cardamom and vanilla millefeuille, there's a sour cherry and pistachio baked Alaska. If your eye does not drift downwards lasciviously to that listing, then you are completely dead inside. It arrives pert and proud: a spectacular ridged whorl of torched Italian meringue, enclosing a heart not just of the advertised cherry and pistachio, but also of frangipane. We attack it from each side, my companion and I, until the plate is emptied and we are required to lay down our spoons, sadly. It is enthusiastically priced at £16. We don't begrudge a penny.
By now a clutch of other tables are occupied and there is the gentle hum of a restaurant engaging fully with its purpose. The service is relaxed without being annoyingly chummy although there is the sense that, given the encouragement to do so, Nord could become a little more serious and a little more formal. For £110 they will create a tasting menu, wine flight extra, which would make it a different type of restaurant but, I suspect, still a very good one. Over at Goodison Park the last ever local derby there has ended in a draw. Here at Nord, even allowing for the occasional missed shot on goal, it's very much a win. And that's the best stab at a football metaphor I have for you.
The company behind Covent Garden restaurants The Petersham and La Goccia has announced their closure, citing the combined impacts of Brexit, Covid and last year's budget. In particular a spokesperson for the company said Brexit had resulted in an 'inability to recruit people with the right experience and skills'. The original Petersham Nurseries restaurant in Richmond is unaffected, as is the garden centre of which it is a part.
Sandwich chain Subway has announced it is diversifying into jacket potatoes, with a range under the Spudway sub-brand being trialled across 170 of its UK stores. The baked potatoes will be fully customisable through a range of toppings, including tuna mayo, chicken tikka and taco beef. The baked potato market has seen a number of ups and downs over the years. Spudulike, originally founded in Edinburgh in the 1970s, eventually became a 40-strong chain, but the last one closed in 2019. Potato merchant Albert Bartlett then went into partnership with chef James Martin to revive Spudulike, but that also failed (subway.com).
Chef Richard Turner, associated with meaty restaurant groups including Hawksmoor, Pitt Cue and Blacklock has stayed on brand with his latest appointment. He has become chef director of venerable American BBQ chain Bodean's, and will be relaunching the menu for the group on 20 March, with the introduction of pork and beef rib platters, Texas toast and what he's calling his 'bone suckin' sauce'. The original branch in London's Soho is also being refurbished (bodeansbbq.com).
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