Chef Eats Out: Moor Hall
Just a week after being awarded a Michelin star, chef-patron Mark Birchall welcomed a host of industry professionals to Moor Hall, his newly opened restaurant with rooms, for our latest Chef Eats Out event, run in association with Udale Speciality Foods. Katherine Price reports
A n unexpectedly warm and sunny October day served as the perfect backdrop for a visit to Moor Hall, Mark Birchall's newly Michelin-starred restaurant with rooms in Aughton, Lancashire.
Birchall, the 2011 Roux Scholar, spent nine years with Simon Rogan, first as head chef of the Michelin-starred L'Enclume in Cartmel, Cumbria, then as group executive chef of his northern operations. He opened Moor Hall in March with business partners Andy and Tracey Bell following a multimillion-pound refurbishment of the Grade II-listed building, and received a Michelin star in October.
About 40 hospitality industry professionals descended on the property last month for The Caterer's latest Chef Eats Out event. They were there to try Birchall's food - not for the first time for many of them - to explore the two-acre walled garden and to take a peek at the informal barn restaurant ahead of its opening. All with a glass of cava in hand, of course.
Guests eventually settled in the main restaurant, a light, airy space overlooking a lake on one side and the garden on the other. The event brings back memories for chef and restaurateur Paul Heathcote, who hosted his own Chef Eats Out in 1997. "You're under an enormous amount of pressure," he said. He is full of admiration for the restaurant: "The place is set up brilliantly and there's beautiful taste in decor."
The meal kicked off with three snacks: parcels of black pudding and pickled gooseberry; potato nests of smoked eel with fermented garlic and edible flowers; and a bright dish of oyster with cured ham, dill and fennel.
"I was a massive fan of the little tasters," said Jez Shaw, owner of the Red Lion Inn in Bobbington, Staffordshire. "The standout one was the smoked eel - the crispiness of the little potato nest and the smokiness of the eel. My single best mouthful."
Tim Allen, until recently executive chef of the Michelin-starred Wild Rabbit in Kingham, Oxfordshire, described the fennel and dill flavours with the oyster as "very clean".
The snacks were followed by a starter of baked carrots three ways, with chrysanthemum and sea buckthorn, and dusted with a Doddington cheese snow, which Allen described as "outstanding", and added: "It's very hard to take a humble ingredient like carrot and make it really work. I don't normally eat herbaceous stuff like the buckthorn, but it worked really well and was very cleverly balanced."
It was paired with an unusual orange wine, a Benimaquia Tinajas, which Heathcote particularly appreciated. "I like to try different things, and I thought the unfiltered orange wine was interesting," he said.
The next course, a Holstein Friesian beef tartare with barbecued celeriac, mustard and shallot, went down well with Anthony Wright, head chef at the L20 restaurant in Liverpool.