Wandering down Horsforth’s Town Street - though more picturesque than most of its counterparts thanks to the patinaed hodgepodge of Yorkshire sandstone which makes up its buildings - is like scanning a line-up of the local high street usual suspects. All the familiar faces servicing the local community and ensuring they don’t have to get the 50A or - god forbid - reckon with the ever shapeshifting road system to get into Leeds city centre.
Caught in a sort of royal can-can linking The Queens Arms at the top and The Old Kings Arms at the bottom, you’ve got an Italian restaurant, a cafe that sells blondies with a jammy dodger on top, one solitary bank with reduced opening hours, another Italian, two charity shops which mostly contain Richard Osman books, a Greggs, a nail salon, a third and surely final Italian and then the small matter of Britain’s Best Local Restaurant.
Bavette Bistro set tongues wagging in Leeds before it was even announced in November 2023. Owners Sandy and Clément - old hands in London restaurants - had moved up North and immersed themselves in the local hospo community by working at The Empire Cafe and Eat Your Greens while looking for a site for their new opening.
There’s a general assumption that the city centre is the Premier League for restaurants - all the money and the big names and the press coverage goes there, and the suburbs are the championship - definitely some talent in there, but usually with the caveat of 'good for the suburbs' or 'good enough to be in the city centre!' So, when Bavette announced they were opening in Horsforth, it felt like a statement of intent.
'The city centre was never on our radar' Sandy tells me. Born and raised in Leeds before moving to London, his recollection from 20 years ago was that 'good places didn’t really last in the city centre' which still has some truth to it. Quality in the city centre is definitely the exception rather than the rule, and a spate of closures towards the end of last year and the beginning of this one shows that the footfall that comes with being central doesn’t result in longevity.
Besides, they were looking to build a neighbourhood bistro, a place that becomes an integral part of the local community. A place where people celebrate their anniversaries or birthdays or just Thursdays, the sort of place you can wander by giddily after a post-work drink with your partner, give each other the 'oh shall we?' look, and 10 minutes later have your coat hung up and be chatting to the server you sometimes bump into while you’re out walking the dog.
And so they built it, and the people of Horsforth were welcomed from near, and the people not-of-Horsforth came from afar and were welcomed just the same. And the apparent dice-roll of opening not-in the city centre was vindicated. Then, a few months later, they came top of the Good Food Guide’s Britain’s Best Local Restaurants list and they were really vindicated.
'The really big eye-opening thing was after the announcement, the amount of people that either came for dinner or just popped through the door to give us congratulations or cards' says Sandy 'they were just so proud of us, of here, of "our local restaurant won that" and they felt a part of it'.
Since then there have been a handful of cases of restaurants already established in the city centre announcing a move to the suburbs. The Empire Cafe is expanding its, ahem, empire and opening a sibling venue to its original Fish Street all-day cafe and restaurant. The Cheesy Living Co is going all the way out to Pudsey to add to their outposts in The Corn Exchange and Oakwood. And North Street OG The Swine That Dines - a classic neighbourhood restaurant in all but location - is completely uprooting and moving to Headingley as The Swine Bistro.
For Sam Pullan of The Empire Cafe, the move was dictated by the type of building required for the new venture. The Highland Laddie is his version of a classic neighbourhood pub, the sort he’s been going to all of his life - local beers, old boys reading the paper at the bar, ham sandwiches, and people coming empty-handed and leaving with a goat (true story, he assures me) - albeit with a chophouse offering in the back room.
These sorts of pubs are a rarity in the city centre these days, and even more rare for them not to be snapped up and homogenised by Greene King or similar, but the former The Highland site in Burley was exactly what he was after.
And there seems to be a demand for it - in the hour that I spent in the still-a-building-site bar with Sam, three separate people knocked on the door to introduce themselves or generally be nosey. 'I’ve been given a target of April to be open by' Sam tells me 'firefighters from the station down the road came round yesterday, one of them used to drink at The Highland when he started 40-odd years ago, and he wants to have his retirement party here'.
The Swine Bistro has had a similar enthusiastic response from locals. When the alcohol license application for their premises was submitted it immediately received objections from local residents. Nothing unexpected, with the site being on Leeds’ notorious ‘Otley Run’ pub crawl - the last application in the area was from the bar chain Loungers, and was denied with 99 objections upheld. Within hours of the locals finding out it was The Swine applying, every single objection was withdrawn, and owners Jo and Stu started receiving visits and messages from supportive locals.
The attitude that the city centre is the gold standard for new openings has left suburbs fairly underserviced, but that seems to be changing.
'The city centre was hospitality focused for 10-15 years, but now it’s become geared more towards retail' says Sam 'it’s world class for shopping, but they’re not the people who are necessarily coming to independent bars and restaurants' which rings true when you look at the cottage industry of big-money status restaurants' like The Ivy Brasserie, Ivy Asia and Habibi thriving, all in close proximity to Leeds’ more upmarket shopping malls.
Jo Myers from The Swine Bistro agrees. 'Town doesn’t feel like a night out any more - our customers on North Street would come in from all over Leeds, and we’d ask where they were going after their meal and they always say ‘back to Chapel Allerton’ or ‘back to Meanwood’ - not to go home, but to carry their night on because there’s more options than in town'
As the unfortunate recent closure of Owt - which moved from the city centre to Burley in 2023 - reminds us, going suburban comes with its own set of challenges like staffing, reliability of stock deliveries and a potentially smaller catchment audience, but Jo sees the latter as an opportunity.
'We don’t like to focus too much on one type of customer - staff at a certain place, people of a certain age - because if they go, you’re in trouble. We’d rather appeal to a diverse group of people, even if it’s from a smaller audience' which is a sentiment echoed by Sandy and Clément from Bavette and Sam from Empire Cafe, and one of the hallmarks of a truly great local restaurant: create a space where everyone can feel welcomed and enjoy themselves.
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