Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and I confess, although this is supposed to be a food blog based in the North East, I had the pleasure of visiting the beautiful city of York yesterday, and I couldn’t help but want to share some of the fantastic food I ate there.
Let’s begin with the House of Trembling Madness, a pub and alcohol shop that I certainly wouldn’t have expected to produce some of the nicest ‘snack’ based food I have ever eaten. I arrived with my family with the intention of only staying for a few drinks, as the selection of beer was quite overwhelming. But after watching a couple across the bar receive a giant steak and ale pie, we decided to take a quick look at the menu to see if there was any light snacks that could tide us over until we had a proper lunch. We chose to share a Countryside Platter with a side of Chorizo in Scrumpy between the three of us, expecting it to be a relatively small dish, but when it turned up it became clear that we had greatly underestimated the size of our order. The platter (consisting of vegetable antipasto, rose petal harissa, hummus, homemade tzatziki, a mixture of olives, pickles, bread from a local bakery, a salad and some crunchy coleslaw) was absolutely massive, and the chorizo alone could have easily been a light meal.
Being a huge fan of hummus and chorizo, those were my favourite parts of the meal. The hummus, unlike the ones I usually buy, had a few whole chickpeas hidden within. This, in my opinion, really added to the texture, and made it especially nice when spreading it over the fresh bread. Additionally, the small dollop of spicy harissa was delicious when mixed into the already gorgeous hummus.
Then the chorizo. The chorizo was still in mini sausage shapes and was bathing in a sauce with onions. After devouring all of the meat, we discovered that where the beauty really lay in this dish was the sauce, which was beyond perfect when you dipped the bread into it.
As you can imagine, we left the House of Trembling Madness with our stomachs comfortably full and satisfied. But, knowing me, when we stumbled across a quaint looking coffee shop promising the best artisan coffee in York, any thoughts of being full went right out of the window (along with any hope of eating ‘healthily’ whilst on our little day trip). I ordered a cappuccino and a slice of their homemade chocolate and raspberry cake (oops).
The coffee, was amazing. And the cake, well that was amazing too. The sweetness of the chocolate cake went really well with the bitter and tangy raspberry spread. Altogether I was really impressed with the taste of both the coffee and the cake, especially since it was from a place we just stumbled upon.
The rest of our day consisted of wandering around York, and although I’m still convinced I could have squeezed in another no doubt fantastic meal, we decided to merely grab a sandwich from Pret to eat once we arrived home. It was probably for the best, as I still felt stuffed from the immense amount of food we had eaten earlier in the day.
One more thing before I’m finished: I’ll be heading up to Edinburgh in a few weeks time, so if anyone has any suggestions as to where I should eat, I’d love it if you could either leave a comment below, or let me know via Instagram. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed hearing about my visit to York, as I certainly enjoyed going.
North East Food Taster 