As I sit at a table, in front of me a plate of beautifully cooked bavette dressed elegantly with a sauce vierge, I notice a big chunk of garlic. In fact there are a great many chunks throughout the dish, and indeed the meal, but this one in particular caught the eye, settled determinedly right in the middle of the plate.
If it had hands, they would be on its hips (if it also had hips). If it had a tongue it would be sticking out. This is not a complaint. This is quite the opposite: this is a love letter to that piece of garlic, and everything it represents of the food at Bavette, a French bistro magnifique in Horsforth, Leeds.
As we hop onto the bus from Leeds City Centre to Horsforth, a journey of twenty minutes or so through a series of quiet Leeds suburbs, I have the sensation that we are also very much jumping onto a bandwagon. Bavette has been open for just five months and in that time has accrued a wealth of plaudits including, most recently, being named the Good Food Guide’s ‘Best local restaurant 2024’. It has also been recommended to me an unignorable number of times in glowing terms by friends and family, so it is perhaps unsurprising to find that what is happening at Bavette is relentlessly brilliant.
From an aesthetic perspective, Bavette delivers exactly what you might expect from a stylish local French bistro – white metro tiles, vintage enamel signage on dark green walls, stylised line drawings of people drinking glasses of red wine, elaborate antique-looking mirrors with golden frames, empty wine bottles in the window, and beautiful blue-rimmed crockery. From the description alone it could sound cliche or, even kitsch, but like everything else at Bavette, the decor feels authentic and well- thought through. You get the sense that they aren’t having to try too hard at this and, importantly, it works: it’s a lovely space in which to spend an evening
The extensive wine menu tells us that the family of one of the restaurant’s owners, Clement Cousin, has been making wine in the Loire Valley for five generations. Of course they have; it is another in the long list of things at Bavette that make perfect sense. There are six wines available from the family’s estate and I try one of their reds; a light, fruity and almost peppery Grolleau. It is, of course, lovely.
We open with croquettes that arrive buried under a drift of finely grated cheese and, once rescued, are golden fried balls of melted Comte. I shouldn’t need to say much more to recommend them. It is hard to go far wrong when frying cheese and these are far from wrong; they are delightful.
Cantabrian anchovies on toast, served with butter (of course) and shallots, are similarly wonderful. My companion remarks that if the anchovies on toast were a part of any other meal they would leave them to the end, leaving the best until last. The same could be said for so many things that we are served throughout our meal.
A starter of house cured Chalk Stream trout is laid in strips, four-in-a-bed, across a puree of smoked cod’s roe, a sharply pickled radish and fennel salad atop providing perfect balance to the wonderfully fatty, oily and richly fishy things going on underneath. Even the Isle of Wight tomatoes with ricotta, from the description alone perhaps not the most exciting sounding dish, are big on flavour, drizzled in an energetic chimichurri that makes me wish I had ordered some bread to clean the plate.
My companion orders the Cornish Ray Wing, adorned with brown potted shrimps, capers and broad beans. The fish is beautifully cooked and presented. Buttery sheets of firm white fish slide off the wing like an ocean wave receding from a Breton beach. There are little chunks of what I think might be cucumber, or certainly something pickled, that complete a kind of perfect balance to the dish.
I order the bavette. Of course I do. In a restaurant that shares its name with the steak, how could you not? There’s a degree of ceremony to the dish: the accompanying “Herbs de Provence Frites” and ratatouille are brought out first and separately in a wonderful kind of procession. The darkly golden chips, chunkily cut, sit in front of me for all of three seconds before I am duty-bound by greed to shove one in my mouth and discover that they are both hotter than the sun and incredible.
As I chew open-mouthed, I swear out loud, primarily owing to the heat, but also possibly because of how good the chips are. As I reach for another chip to wilfully do myself more damage, the bavette itself is put in front of me, and this is where we get back to where I began: that big piece of garlic.
The flavours at Bavette are rendered in technicolour, and that piece of garlic is emblematic of how unapologetically they are delivered. Perhaps other places might shy away from putting such big bits of garlic on your plate for fear of falling foul of delicate sensibilities that, for whatever reason, exist around garlic (and other things, I’m sure), but thankfully Bavette are not afflicted by any such shyness. Which isn’t to say that all Bavette trade in is brutish flavours. Everything is incredibly well, and delicately, balanced.
For dessert, we share a crème brulée, served with half an olive oil and thyme roast peach. By this point I am in danger of running out of superlatives: the dessert is another brilliant course in what was a practically faultless evening.
The staff are wonderfully helpful all night and lovely to chat to; our server tells us that it is hard to make recommendations because everything is so good, something they acknowledge you might expect your server to say, but in this case I believe them. What a nice problem to have.
Address: 4-6 Town St, Horsforth, Leeds LS18 4RJ
Hours: Wednesday and Thursday 5.30 – 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday 12 – 3 and 5.30 – 11 p.m. Sunday 12 – 5.30 p.m.
Phone: 0113 258 2900
Menu: bavettebistro.com
Reservations: opentable.co.uk
