Three Hares Cafe in Sedbergh
If you like to mooch around local North West markets on the weekend, you might be familiar with the work of The Moocher who make a range of more unusual sweet and savoury items, sauces and pickles based around seasonal wild herbs and game. What you might have noticed, is that for the past year or two, they’ve not been around. Previously residents of Levenshulme, James and Nina had a baby (Ernest) and decided to head back up to James’s hometown, Sedbergh to set up in a more permanent location – The Three Hares Cafe.
We got to know them both when we approached them to do a special seasonal March event with our ‘social butchery’ project in 2013, Manchester Meat Club. Across a few trestle tables James and Nina encouraged about twenty game punters to skin and de-bone hares and rabbits before Nina cooked up a range of courses with them.
“The Three Hares symbol represents our style of cooking, influenced by James’ upbringing in the local area involved with Wild Foods and Game, and heavily influenced by Nina’s background of growing up in Germany with Japanese parents.”
Nina is a highly accomplished cook with an awe-inspiring work ethic and food knowledge base. Her heritage might only be incidental, but together with James’ keenness for foraging, catching wild protein using ‘traditional methods’ and butchery, their menu might be the reason why food critics are hot-footing it up to the foot of The Howgills and banging on the door (this really happened, I got it from the horses mouth.)
Three Hares is a cafe and bakery during the day and a bistro in the evening, and they open seven days per week. They also cater private functions and were preparing for one on the evening of the day we visited, meaning that Nina (the mother of a toddler, remember) had been up since 5am that morning baking all the bread (she had been a baker in Dusseldorf).*
As you’d expect, the menu revolves around the seasons and where they are up to with what they recently sourced from their farmer friends. Obviously they know the local cattle, rare breed sheep and pig farmers in the area so they tend to buy whole carcasses and butcher it themselves. At any point, there might be a glut of Galloway beef, or venison various ways.
Evening menus are divided into small and big plates for sharing or not. They gave me a few past examples to look at, so expect dishes such as kidneys on toast, venison and wild boar terrine, game pie, spiced hogget burger or wild rabbit stew with sorrel.
Lunch is more suited to the local daytime trade with a selection of fantastic sandwiches on Nina’s bread and there is always fresh soup. Then the dishes move up the scale from simple; mushrooms on toast or Welsh rarebit, to Gammon, Egg and Chips or Pea and Ham Risotto, through to heartier things like Wild Boar and Venison stew.
On the sunny spring day we visited, after a drive through narrow lanes lined with ramsons, we couldn’t resist Wood Pigeon, Wild Garlic and Purple Sprouting Broccoli Salad with bread and butter.
Barbecue Pure Galloway Beef Brisket Baguette with Chips was a hearty lunch with brisket slow cooked in a mildly sweet and aromatically spiced sauce until soft.
You can guess what animal they were working their way through in the kitchen that week as Pure Galloway Beef Burger on Brioche was also on the menu.
We were too full for dessert but there was a pile of delicious scones, tray bakes, donuts and layered cakes which were selling like, er, hot cakes during the time we were there.
So if you’re in the area (conveniently close to Yorkshire, Cumbria and Lancashire) pop in and see them. We’re already planning our next trip to go through the evening menu and the wine list.
Three Hares is only small, I counted around twenty covers, but they’re on the lookout for larger premises, possibly somewhere with land so they can start growing some fresh produce themselves (Nina is obviously not busy enough.)
*They are also looking for staff both in the kitchen and out front, so if you know anybody, please get them to call 015396 21058
Three Hares Cafe 57 Main Street Sedbergh Cumbria LA10 5AB
HOURS
Monday - Thursday : 8:30am - 5pm
Friday & Saturday : 8.30am till 11pm
Sunday - 10:30am - 4pm
They will open other evenings for larger bookings










