Yorkersgate, Malton, North Yorkshire (01653 639 096). Meal for two, including wine and service: £110
I am studying a plate of food more intently than usual. Mostly, I am trying to work out what the hell to do about it. I must look odd, alone here in a crowded hotel dining room on a Friday night, head bowed as if in supplication. I am taking this dish very seriously. I'm not struggling to craft an opinion. I know exactly what I think: that it's the single best plate of food I have been served so far this year.
The question is, can I say so? There are circumstances at play here and in the age of social media one must always be alive to circumstance. I consider lying. I'll just claim it was a normal review, that I turned up unannounced and did the thing: ordered the second cheapest bottle of wine on the list, and avoided the pork-belly dish even though I wanted it. But someone would rumble me. The Talbot Hotel in Malton? Hang on, didn't you just do a couple of events at the Malton Food Festival? Surely the room was comped, and dinner, too? They knew you were coming.
Well yes. All true. And yet: the single best plate of food I have been served this year? I need to tell you about that, don't I? That's my job. Of course there's also the name of the chef at the top of the menu to consider. When, last year, I bigged up James Martin's cooking at a weird Leeds casino – since closed – people blew raspberries at me. They didn't like me saying nice things about that bloke off the telly with the twinkly Saturday-morning game-show tone. Later, when he emerged from the kitchen, it would transpire that not only was Martin writing a cracking menu here, too – he was also cooking it, had been all week.
So eventually, a decision: I'll pay for dinner, explain the situation and then you can choose whether to ignore this review or not. Your call. The Talbot is a hulking bit of York stone in a solid York-stone market town, not far from the Castle Howard estate where Martin's father worked and he grew up. The dining room is a glowering rectangular space, the walls hung with lacklustre sporting portraits of bemused-looking old nags. Any lightness on this Friday evening comes from the other diners, who are that sturdy well-heeled Yorkshire crowd who don't mind paying as long as there's value. Two courses are £33, three are £39.
The menu does a lot of local name dropping: the asparagus is from the Vale of York. The plaice and halibut are from the north coast; the beef is braised in a local beer I've never heard of, beer names not being a strong point of mine. I start with a disc of salmon, cured in the hotel's grounds, which has that ideal soft but meaty texture, like it wants you to eat it. There's the punch of pickled ginger, the crunch of charred cucumber, the power that only a spring onion, refusing to watch its manners, can give you. Unlike me, it is all extraordinarily well balanced.
And then this year's best dish so far: a Yorkshire-sized beef cheek – as long as my hand – braised for 12 hours in that Riggwelter beer, so that it falls apart on the fork rather than the plate. It lies on a pearl barley risotto, spun through with a wild garlic purée the comedy colour of a St Patrick's Day parade, alongside spears of grilled salsify. Around this are effective modernist touches: soft layers of onion holding cubes of a warm beer jelly and sprinkled with a powder made from dried and blitzed onions. It is that rare thing: cleverness and overt technique that also speaks to the greedy side of you. Or at least of me.
I finished as I did in Leeds, with his white chocolate and whisky croissant butter pudding. It was that ideal blend of crisp, flaky layers of French pastry and, at its heart, a shameless, doughy, sweet collapse. There you have it: three beautifully poised, close to faultless dishes, paid for and eaten. Whether, given the circumstances, you are prepared to take my word for it, is entirely up to you.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
