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Lake Road
Ambleside
Cumbria
LA22 0AD
01539 422 012
www.lakeroadkitchen.co.uk
“Don’t believe the hype”, said the popular hip hop combo Public Enemy in 1988, and quite right they were too. I think Chuck D was inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky when he took out his quill and parchment, but he might just as well have been writing about restaurants.
Despite more years of eating out than I’d admit to, I still get sufficiently excited about visiting a hyped up restaurant to all too easily forget Mr D’s dictum, often leading to post-nosh disappointment.
This was very much the case as, just a couple of hours out of Newcastle, we wound our way down through the almost cloyingly pretty scenery of Troutbeck, Ullswater and then over The Kirkstone Pass, en route to dinner at Lake Road Kitchen.
This dinky little 9-tabler has been the subject of much breathless veneration since it opened in 2014, garnering big love in the blogosphere as well as an almost unheard of 10/10 from The Guardian’s guru Marina O’Loughlin.
Chef James Cross has managed to pack stints at some of this planet's very finest restaurants into his 34 years, including a lengthy stay at the world’s current number one, Noma in Copenhagen. The foraging, fermenting, ageing and pickling that have become the hallmark of René Redzepi’s “New Nordic Cuisine” are very much in evidence at Lake Road Kitchen, whose website exhorts the reader to “come and taste the food of the North”.
I thought I would show my solidarity with the recently-flooded Lake District by doing just that, booked weeks ahead to try their tasting menu, then, like a kid before Christmas, started counting down the days.
All of this preamble gives you some sort of context to a much-anticipated meal that, although certainly enjoyable, left me very much not blown away, and even a bit nonplussed. Some of this may simply have been a matter of preference, but I would maintain that some was down to execution too.
