Where The Light Gets In, Stockport: ‘The most exciting food I’ve eaten in years’
Not so much new Nordic as new northern, this is a procession of brilliance
Let’s get it out of the way from the get-go: Where The Light Gets In serves the most exciting food I’ve had in years. And it’s not in London, Copenhagen or Portland, Oregon; it’s in Stockport. Never have I trudged so dutifully to a destination only to exit at the other end quite so starey-eyed and evangelical.
Stockport: seriously? Before high horses are clambered upon, chef/owner Sam Buckley is equally wry about the location. It is, simply, not where you’d expect this kind of firecracker creativity in £65-a-head, tasting-menu-only format. Stockport boasts restaurants called Elvis’ Kitchen (“three-course luxury meal cooked by the ELVIS chef”, which, if I’m honest, appeals hugely). And the town centre is not, well, edifying. But here, around the old market building, there’s a pleasing, brick-lined moodiness, the air scented with malt from the Robinsons brewery. Finding this former coffee warehouse proves tricky: we teeter down vertiginous Rostron Brow (“famous for its 19th-century alehouses of ill repute”) more than once before we find the entrance. So far, so Lowry. Inside, it’s a different matter, not so much open kitchen as a vast, lustworthy actual kitchen with Ercol tables dotted around. It’s the ultimate, wood-burning-stove-heated loft pad with rooftop views.
There’s no menu.
Tartare of Macclesfield trout. Photograph: Rebecca Lupton for the Guardian Salt-baked beets, toasted hazelnuts, jaggy little jack-by-the-hedge leaves – aka garlic mustard plant, with all the pungency that conveys – a swirl of jammy beetroot puree and a smooth blurt of airy hazelnut almost-butter. Vegetarian wizardry, this swayed even the table’s beetroot-loathers.
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A meaty broth, as limpid as tea, with a powder puff of wild garlic blossom to dunk in it like a teabag. It scents the broth, the broth “cooks” the blossom: brilliant in its simplicity and insanely delicious.
A cube of pink middlewhite pork, aged for five weeks in caramelised cultured butter, its fat crisped in a pan (which is where the building’s lack of extraction becomes painfully evident). Nothing else on the plate bar a few fried, fragrant leaves, herbs and flowers (they say ramsons this time, possibly sleight of hand to deflect us from other wild garlic appearances). “This,” says charming GM Emma, “is the dish that made me hand in my CV.” I’m tempted to follow suit.
I haven’t room to wax lyrical about the wine flights, notable for the consistent delivery of pure pleasure (not a given with natural and biodynamic). There’s nothing that doesn’t dazzle, from the cocktail that comes with candy-striped bags of crisps and tins of create-your-own-flavour powder made from produce that would otherwise be wasted (dried scallop plus kombu: blimey), to the tiny pastilles with the coffee that flood the mouth with sweet, boozy Buckfast, that “tonic wine” beloved of the Glaswegian jakey. Oh, OK, there is one fish dish I don’t love, woolly and underseasoned, but otherwise this is a procession of brilliance.
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