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Otto Damahi SO WHEN the restaurant trade is screaming in pain from rising costs and lack of customers why does a man open yet another one? Has he lost his marbles? Let’s ask Otto Damahi after our relaxed, very pleasant meal at the eponymous Otto’s at Kenwood Hall Hotel in leafy Nether Edge, Sheffield. “I’ve just turned 60. What else could I do?” he asks, looking around his full, animated new…

My string of garlic I GROW garlic but not very well. They are usually just cloves from the kitchen planted into nutrient- poor ground in my ‘allotment’ – a little bit of the lawn dug up for vegetables. It does OK for rhubarb and nasturtiums whose  leaves provide peppery salads and the seeds a sort of poor man’s capers. I’m lucky to have done so well with the garlic this year although most of…

Braised ox cheeks on horseradish mash I’M NOT sure if I have gone up or down in the world when it comes to food reviewing. I’m at the Silver Plate, the showcase restaurant of the award-winning catering department of Sheffield College for, hopefully, a first class night out. Once I’d have been expected to  sing for my supper by turning in 600 or so polished words and sparkling phrases for the…

Cherries in brandy A KIL0 box of Spanish cherries was £4 in Tesco and I knew just what to do with them. Cherry jam or jelly? Cherry pie. Cherryade? Nope. Cherries in brandy. Just the sort of thing to bottle and tuck away at the back of the cupboard to brighten up the autumn and winter months. Pop them in a pudding or use them to enliven a fruit salad. And when you’ve spooned the last one out…

YOU KNOW that irritation you feel when your favourite reviewer or columnist goes on holiday and there’s an unfamiliar name or, worse, nothing to match it on the page? Instead there’s a little apology in small type which read “Henry Buggins is away.”are It means he ( or she ) has gone on holiday and can’t be bothered – or not get paid, more like – for covering their absence. Well let me tell…

Jersey Royals at Sheffield Market NO POINT in asking at your local greengrocer for the first Jersey Royals of the season. “Too expensive to sell,” is the usual response. You could always go to somewhere like Dore where they don’t mind shelling out for a spud. Last year I waited a bit and went to Tesco. But Sheffield Market never lets you down. I was just about to buy some salad potatoes at a…

Organiser Stephanie Chung UNLIKE some communities in Sheffield, the Chinese have always kept a low profile. It’s been a case of heads down, work hard and carry on. If their contribution to the city has been overlooked it will be rectified shortly by an exhibition and project at Weston Park Museum. Changing Seasons traces the Chinese population from the earliest days, a wave of immigration…

FIRST THE good news for those of us who love Thomas Samworth’s inventive, honest food at the No Name Bistro, in Crookes: He’s turned the volume down on the music. And if memory serves me well it’s a more adult soundtrack than the Generation Z cacophony I last heard. That matters. There’s been more than one venue spoiled by an audio ambience chosen by tattooed chefs several decades adrift from…

All change: New name for the Med WHAT’S IN a name? A once fairly illustrious one in Sheffield catering has just disappeared with the renaming of the Mediterranean restaurant on Sharrowvale Road. Opened almost 40 years ago, taking over from a Caribbean eaterie which had had a brief run in the former post office, it was one of the city’s first entries in the Good Food Guide. And tbe first…

Moment of truth: Abyen versus oyster THIS IS the moment just before my 13-year-old grandson Abyen has his first-ever oyster at the Clam & Cork seafood bar on Doncaster’s fish market. It did not go well. It is incumbent on any seafood lover to inculcate the joys of briny foodstuffs into the younger members of his family as a kind of rite of passage. I had taught his mother how to shell a prawn…

I’M NOT the first person to say this but Jersey Royals don’t taste as good as they used to. Earlier this year my local greengrocer refused to sell them as he said they weren’t  worth the money. I had to take his word for it. Mind you, we were disappointed with the flavour last year as well. Now, rather like buying the first strawberries, the first Jerseys were always a bit of a thing for us.…

The pub: Soon to burst into colour ALISTAIR Myers sounds a little bit worried on the phone. Had I heard he’d taken over the Old Eyre Arms pub at Hassop? I had. I have sepia-tinted memories of dark rooms, a grandfather clock ticking hoarsely  in a corner and the ghostly shade of a cavalier lurking inside the glorious ivy-covered pub. And Derbyshire oatcakes on the menu. Well, said Alistair, …

FANCY A break? Let’s pop in here. Cappuccino  and an Americano, milk on the side? And a service charge. Yes, you read that right. Service charge when you’ve just had coffee. Of course, it is ‘optional’, that weasel word which means “We think you are a complete sh*t if you don’t. “ It’s enough to knock the froth off your cappuccino. Now as far as I’m concerned this is just not on. Restaurants,…

YOU MIGHT not immediately think of pairing smoked salmon with pork scratchings and a smidgen or two of avocado but it works brilliantly. “Mexican influence,” says chef John Parsons in the kitchen of Sheffield ‘s Beer Engine pub between courses. Labelled as ‘pig crackers’, the scratchings were wedged  in a glass with some blood orange, lime, chilli and coriander,  combining slitheriness and…

Light my fire: Chef Leslie fans the flames WOOD SMOKE wafts enticingly around Dyson Place and there’s the smell of cooked food on the breeze. My nose twitches at the memory of Bonfire Night and Sunday afternoon barbecues but we’re in for something a lot more sophisticated than blackened bangers and undercooked chicken thighs. Tucked coyly away in the corner of this shops and eateries complex…

Here’s two I baked earlier I HAD just switched the bread oven on when I heard the genial Paddy O’Connell announce on Radio 4 that it was Real Bread Week. Good me for me: I was taking part. But then every week in this household is a real bread week. I listened closely to hear what real bread might be and some pundit or other said sourdough. Well if your idea of a good bread is a crust with the…

The pies have it IT’S getting better but there is still some way to go for Bakewell Farmers’ Market. We used to visit regularly and it was a busy, bustling place full of lovely stalls full of things you just had to buy. Then Covid struck and when life restarted the market was a poor shrunken thing. We went one Saturday 18 months ago and there was hardly anything there. So we gave it a miss …