Anthony's, 19 Boar Lane, Leeds (0113 245 5922). Meal for two, including wine and service, £100
I live in fear of the 'liver in lager' moment. I know it's inevitable. I know it's coming. But that does not make the prospect any easier to contemplate. One day soon, a young British chef, spurred on by the success of Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck, and the trail-blazing of chefs like Marc Veyrat and Pierre Gagnaire, will create a menu of such unutterable awfulness, such unspeakable disgustingness that it will justify the use of a word like 'disgustingness' that doesn't actually exist. Liver in lager, the speciality of chef Aubrey in Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet, won't be the half of it. There will be Marmite ice creams paired with peanut butter foams. There will be pork belly jellies with sardine pralines and truffles of maple syrup emulsified with anchovy. Terrible, terrible things will happen, and all in the name of molecular gastronomy.
I will confess that, when I first heard about Anthony's, a new restaurant in Leeds with true molecular-gastronomic pedigree, I did wonder whether the liver-in-lager moment might be upon us.
I know Leeds very well, or at least I knew it once. I was a student there in the Eighties. In those days, if you wanted to eat well in Leeds, you had to go to Harrogate. Or stay home and cook. The idea that it might now be ready for a restaurant pushing at the very boundaries of culinary endeavour was troubling.
Admittedly the city has changed a lot. There is no longer space in this newspaper for the headline 'Man in Leeds Drinks Cappuccino'. It now boasts a number of good restaurants and a couple of them - Pool Court, No 3 York Place - are very good. But for a town of its size and wealth, there are still not as many as there should be. What atrocities against food might a new restaurant here commit, in an attempt to make a name for itself? How much Marmite could end up in the ice cream machine?
I needn't have worried. Tony Flinn, whose name it is above the door, spent two years as part of Ferran Adria's famed brigade at El Bulli in Spain. Other British chefs have worked there, but for free. Flinn got paid. He has form, and it shows where it counts: on the plate. His food is simple and uncluttered, no more than a couple of ideas expertly executed. Not that you would expect this from reading his menus, which suggest something other: salad of crab, green pumpkin-seed praline; Anjou squab, Jabugo ham, pink grapefruit drops; roast langoustines, fennel-tea consomme. There are references to smoked oil and Parmesan air and olive-oil chocolate bonbons.
This menu is peacock plumage, because the reality is rather less challenging. Partly, this is because some of those excitable ingredients don't actually deliver. After a palate cleanser of coconut ice cream to be combined with a doll's house jug of rum and lime juice (essentially, a pina colada in a bowl), we were brought a slice of an exquisite duck confit terrine which, we were told, had been dressed with 'charcoal oil'. The terrine was very good, rich and meaty and the right temperature to bring out the flavours, but neither I nor my companion, Ian, could detect the charcoal tones. A pity. I liked the idea. Similarly, in Ian's starter of glistening fresh crab with a delicate salad of leaves, the pumpkin seeds added a distinct nuttiness but didn't exactly put out on the praline claim.
I had the squab to start and it was truly spectacular: tender pink slices of the bird, laid out on a generous slice of the ham, nicely warmed, so each leant a sweetness to the other, cut through by the back acidity of the grapefruit. The same precision was evident in my main course, a slice of seared salt cod that broke into huge pearly flakes alongside a 'cannelloni' of pork, in which shards of crisp belly had been enclosed in a thin rolled slice of the same. The technical term for this is 'Yum!' Ian's rabbit came in frighteningly tender slices, atop a bed of a nutty Peruvian grain called quinoa.
The nearest we got to science was a pre-dessert of milk gently flavoured with parsnip that had journeyed through an ice machine on its way to us. It turned up as a soft powdery snow that burst into nothing save a creamy flavour on the tongue. Of the puddings we tried, the star was a chocolate fondant with a black sesame-seed ice cream the colour of those sexy grey, slate tiles. And then a startlingly good cup of espresso. (Perhaps it's time for the headline 'Man Drinks Espresso in Leeds'?)
The restaurant itself - an upstairs bar and a basement dining room - is a simple, elegant affair of dark wood floors, creamy walls and leather chairs. If there is a gripe, it is that it took 45 minutes to get the first morsel on the table, which rushed us at the end when I had to run for a train, but otherwise service was charming and the food so good I pretty much forgave them everything. Even their inability to work the till at the last.
The bill for this, with a £23 Chateauneuf-du-Pape from a short list with a few bargains, was £105. My companion, who lives in a small West Yorkshire village with too many syllables in its name, thought this on the pricey side. Obviously, because I have absolutely no sense of the value of anything, and don't live in a cardboard box in middle of t'road, I'm going to disagree. It seems an entirely reasonable amount to pay for this level of skill and good taste. And for the relief of discovering that no liver had ventured anywhere near any lager.