I did my best to go into 2025 with an optimistic twinkle in my eye. I did! and to give myself credit, it took three days until that twinkle glazed over into a thousand-yard stare. The twinkle was extinguished by a @leedsplussocial reel detailing ‘three ways the Leeds fine dining scene changed in 2024’.
Finally, a bit of journalism!
Did they look at the external conditions that have caused fine dining to fall out of favour with audiences? Hm no.
Did they dig into the circumstances surrounding Leeds’ only M*chelin-star restaurant kamikaze-ing its star by shutting down, reopening under a different name, before liquidating with £1 million in debts in the space of a year? Not exactly.
Did they explore how the dynamic between ‘restaurant’ and ‘critic’ has shifted so much that the head chef of the city’s last remaining ‘fine dining’ restaurant has pivoted to filming himself eating fast food burgers in piss-soaked alleyways to try and become an influencer?
Nah. Let’s just show some old uncanny footage of Etci Mehmet (think Salt Bae’s restaurant if you ordered it from Shein) and local MC Tom Zanetti’s fourth attempt at a hospitality venue (an AI-generated ‘Dubai lounge’ in a shopping centre).
We used to be a city where interesting things happened organically. Less than 10 years ago we had enough of an independent food and drink community to facilitate multiple food and drink festival programs per year. And not the ‘village fetes but with a chef demonstration in a gazebo’ ones either. Leeds was on the map.
Young, creative people were able to start businesses (some of which have survived and are still providing hundreds of jobs in the city, some of which haven’t) and there was an informed, engaged, and interested appetite to support them. Now we’ve got third-rate bootlegs of places which exist somewhere between the third and fourth circles of hell. Adult creches and gold leaf restaurants for Forex Guys and ‘Course in bio’ scammers with a four-year plan to ride the wave, and then leave the unit and staff abandoned when the investors have hit their forecast returns.
I had a slightly abridged rant on an Instagram story recently and found it quite heartening to hear that I’m not alone in my despair. So that’s nice.
It’s not productive though, wallowing. Is it? Feels good, sure, but it doesn’t get a lot done. So rather than spewing negativity, here are a few things to be optimistic about in 2025.
The Bavette Effect
I’ve written — at length, on more than one occasion — about how much I love Bavette as a standalone entity. But beyond that, the commercial and critical payoff to their risk of opening a mid-to-high end restaurant in a suburb could turn out to be a watershed moment for local dining in Leeds. There have always been pockets of brilliance from suburban start-ups, but now city centre operators are decentralising.
Empire Café’s team will be creeping just outside of the city centre limits this year with a new venture - gastropub The Highland Laddie, and The Swine That Dines is in the process of upping sticks and relocating to Headingley - suggesting that serious operators are starting to consider the suburbs as a viable alternative to the city centre. In the past few days the widely and deeply-adored Owt - which moved from the Corn Exchange to Burley in late 2023 - announced that they wouldn’t be re-opening after their January break, which does warn that suburb-operating isn’t hospitality on easy mode.
The un-boring of influencers
Podcast equipment should cost one million pounds. Instagram reels should, well, maybe not cost a million pounds, but they shouldn’t be encouraged, let alone rewarded by free meals.
We do not need another dead-behind-the-eyes fashun girlies or Normal Bloke In Guinness Hat narrating reels of themselves eating ‘the best carbonara I have e-ver ea-ten’ at Zizzi in the robotic cadence you’d use to read your postcode out over a poor phoneline, or give your name in a hostage video.
Part of the reason for the dumbing down of Leeds’ food and drink is the cycle of: Media celebrates mediocrity for views. PR company rewards the media. The mediocre place that paid the PR company enjoys a boost in traffic until people realise it’s mediocre, or they move onto the next place paying the PR company to bribe the influencers into celebrating. Good system!
Very few people (and zero local media outlets) are brave enough to show a bit of personality or, god forbid, critical thinking anymore in case it jeopardises their invite to the next Boojum friends & family event. The main exceptions to that rule being Dan and Daryl at 2PK who have taken an absurdist sketch approach to covering food, and Hobnobs & Bovril and Leedsindulgence who give honest and balanced accounts of their experiences.
I hope their candidness shows people that you can actually talk (or maybe even write!) about food without just contributing to the ‘Is THIS the BEST X in Leeds’ or ‘What’s your favourite X in Leeds?’ tedium. Stop it! We can do better!
Some good new stuff in the city centre, actually
It’s not all bad!
It’s mostly bad, yes. The vast majority is bad. But there are some people still fighting against the deluge of total dross in the city centre. Recent and upcoming openings stemming the flow include grown-up all-day versatile pub Woodside (from the Brunswick & Melbourne team), listening bar and late-night cafe Holding Patterns (from Hyde Park Book Club), BAKE - a yassified Cooplands whose English bakery X Viennoiserie mash ups have taken the dock by storm. Plus Bottle Chop’s upcoming natural wine bar and bottleshop on Call Lane, and Alfonso’s bodega-style sandwiches from the Thiccc Sauce/Koben smokehouse stable.
Revisiting old favourites
I will (reluctantly) admit that I’m part of the problem. I did the maths and it turns out in 2024 I went out for tea in town a grand total of three times. One of those was a morbid curiosity visit to Six By Nico so doesn’t even count really. Three! I used to do that in a weekend.
How can I complain that there’s nothing in town ‘for me’ when my end of year bank statements suggest I only go into town to go to the Duck & Drake?
There are still a handful of great places in town and I’m going to make more effort to get on the 56 bus and revisit in no particular order: Wen’s, Eat Your Greens, Sarto, Brunswick (for a burger), Below Stairs, Ox Club to see what former Reliance head chef Tom is doing with the place, and Stuzzi. And acting European by sitting out on the pedestrianised bit near the station and flitting between evening-service Laynes and Friends of Ham.
A version of this article was first published in the newsletter Spinning Plates by Thom Archer.
