23 Winckley Square, Preston (01772 252 732)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £80
In the mid-Eighties, when I was the editor of a student newspaper, I was a regular visitor to Preston, where our printers were located, and came to regard the city as a handsome, businesslike place. In my experience, no one went to Preston for the culture or the cafe society. Certainly nobody went there for the food. You went to Preston with a purpose, which it always seemed to satisfy in a solid, uncomplaining way. I did eat stuff there, but the food was either wrapped in pastry or had just come out of the deep fat fryer. Obviously this will be regarded as middle-class southern snobbery, but really it isn't, just an honest recollection of the times.
I accept, though, that modern prejudices can be informed by out-of-date memories, and when I concluded that lunch in Preston was inevitable - I had an actor friend who was working not far away in Blackpool, who claimed she needed cheering up - my pulse didn't exactly race with excitement. Another friend runs a set of restaurant awards for the north and had created a spreadsheet which cross-references all the restaurant guides for the area. He told me the pickings were slim. There are some great restaurants in Lancashire - Northcote Manor, for example - but not within a cab ride of the city. 'Of course,' he said, 'there is Heathcote's place.'
Ah yes, Paul Heathcote, one of those determined souls who has done so much to champion regional food on his patch. He has worked tirelessly for a dozen years, not just at his flagship restaurant in Longridge but across a chain of simpler brasseries. But staying power can be a double-edged sword, and in recent years I had been told that his other places were built for volume catering rather than out of any commitment to his underlying doctrine. Well, if the Winckley Square Chophouse is anything to go by, I now know this to be a load of old cobblers. I am ashamed that I should have thought otherwise, ought to be punished and probably will be in a bunch of shouty emails from aggrieved readers in the northwest.
Things boded well from the start. The sun was out in Preston, and in Winckley Square itself the daffodils bowed their heads shyly towards the redbrick Victoriana at its fringes. Plus, my friend was not at all in need of cheering up, having purchased a set of nipple tassels on the front in Blackpool, which she swore she had worn under her costume on stage the night before.
The Winckley Square Chophouse is a long, wide room, with dark floors and white walls, hung with quotations from Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany: lists of seasonal foods, the correct terms for cooking steak in foreign languages, and so forth. Yes, there is a whiff of the corporate about the place. The wipe-down wine list includes bottles 'specially selected' by Heathcote himself, and outside they were advertising World Cup deals. But the staff are friendly and the food is built on solid principles.
A tranche of confit salmon, still just warm, came with a strident potato salad, cut with red onions and capers and nothing else. It didn't need anything else. The same confidence was there in a salad of very rare peppered beef with endive. In itself nothing groundbreaking, but nicely put together, and I found myself wondering just how long it has been since British restaurant-goers were willing to accept a piece of meat served this pink.
Indeed, it is the quality of the meat that struck me most. For my main course I chose the mixed grill, a special, and it was - a lovely old-fashioned word this - splendid. First up Heathcote's own black pudding, made with solid pieces of fibrous ham hock, to remind you of where the blood came from. There was a crisped piece of gammon, and some fine, flavourful pieces of steak. And no, it was not tender, for who really wants their meat to cut like butter? It was dense and chewy and spoke of a life well lived on a grassy hill.
The Cumberland sausage with black pudding was perhaps an unnecessary reprise of the pudding on the other side of the plate, but it had a pleasing gameyness. The seasoning of the other main - grilled sea bream with mushrooms and a parsley relish - was a little over-enthusiastic, but it was still a measured plateful.
We finished with lemon meringue sundae, a sort of Eton mess with citrus bite rather than red fruit, and a Yorkshire curd tart which came with some rhubarb and an unnecessary dollop of clotted cream. And then out into the sunshine of a Preston afternoon where we agreed it had been a lovely meal, at a reasonable price, in a fine city; the sort of day, my friend suggested, deserving of nipple tassels (which she just so happened to have with her). At which point I put her on the train back to Blackpool. I decided I liked Preston far too much to inflict that upon the place.
