30/04/2022

Tasting Menu at The Flintlock, Cheddleton

It’s not surprising that The Flintlock at Cheddleton in the Staffordshire Moorlands was recently awarded 2 AA Rosettes. Because my local restaurant just gets better and better. I ate their latest tasting menu last night and couldn’t fault a thing.

With punchy flavours, great attention to detail, quality local and seasonal produce, even if this place wasn’t on my doorstep, I’d travel some way to eat here.

In this post, besides reviewing the latest tasting menu at The Flintlock, I look back at some favourite meals and see just how far they’ve come.

A GREAT START

It’s always nice to be proved right, isn’t it?

I first visited The Flintlock at Cheddleton within a couple of weeks of its opening in September 2020. In my blog review of that meal I said that chef patron Thom Bateman and his team were off to a great start.

Based on already very sound cooking, great flavours and quality produce, I predicted that, over time, the few rough edges or quibbles I noted would disappear.

With the casual, friendly canal-side restaurant barely a fifteen-minute walk from my home, I’ve since happily (and greedily) followed The Flintlock’s progress. I’ve been hugely impressed and I’m not alone. Because they were recently awarded two coveted AA rosettes.

A couple of months after my first visit, I had a knockout Sunday lunch.

I started with an imaginative wood pigeon and potato press with pickled brambles. That was followed by a proper satisfying roast dinner of crisp pork belly, a fantastic sausage and black pudding roll, plus all the trimmings including plenty of Yorkshire puddings and creamy cauliflower cheese.

I somehow also managed to find room for a heavenly rice pudding with brulée topping, served with pear sorbet and a gingerbread biscuit.

At £20 for 2 courses or £25 for 3, I thought this was great value for such a high standard of cooking. For that price you’re also getting top quality local produce.

LOCKDOWN: RESTAURANT FOOD AT HOME

When lockdown struck, the hospitality industry rose magnificently to the challenge.

Like many other venues, The Flintlock kept us (and themselves) going by offering restaurant quality food to enjoy at home.

I think my absolute favourite of any dine at home meal during lockdown was a stunning duck dish from The Flintlock.

The confit duck had rich, soft flesh and perfectly crispy skin. Just as good were the potatoes that came with it: beautiful 24-hour duck fat ‘thousand layer’ potatoes, both crispy and melting. Veg was spring greens with wild garlic emulsion and buttered Chantenay carrots. Bringing the whole lot together was a knockout Pedro Ximenez duck sauce.

IT JUST GETS BETTER & BETTER

Going through my social media posts about The Flintlock post-lockdown, I see they have a familiar theme. Each time I go back, I find the food is even better than before.

For example, of a dinner in May 2021 I wrote, “I’d say this was my favourite meal yet: absolutely faultless with exquisite flavours”.

My starter was the dish you see above. A crispy and soft pig cheek bonbon served with barbecued prawns, prawn oil and prawn oil seasoning. Alongside was a wonderfully spicy pineapple ketchup.

This was followed by an incredibly well-flavoured rump of local lamb with perfectly cooked crispy sweetbread. There was also creamy goats curd, wild garlic and the best hash brown ever – flavoured with lamb fat, I could’ve eaten a pile of those. All this was brought together by a rich lamb sauce.

Pud was a white chocolate and miso cheesecake. This had a great balance of sweetness and creaminess which was cut through with the savoury edge of miso. Alongside was a smooth black sesame ice cream plus sweet-tart cherries and cherry gel.

TASTING MENU AT THE FLINTLOCK

With cooking at The Flintlock now at this level, it wasn’t surprising when they started offering tasting menus. Tasting menus are a great way to show off the skills of a kitchen and I love them. Rather than spending ages deciding what you want (or, at a favourite place like this, having to dismiss what you want least) you get a series of small dishes.

Eating this way, you can sample so much more. What I particularly like is that you often come away loving something you probably wouldn’t have ordered if you had a choice.

The first tasting menu I ate at The Flintlock was in November 2021.

That meal only confirmed what I already thought. That this place was getting better and better. I wrote: “the team really surpassed themselves this time. All the dishes were perfectly executed with great attention to detail and wonderful balance of flavours and textures”.

Bringing us bang up to date, last night I ate the latest tasting menu at The Flintlock.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 TASTING MENU AT THE FLINTLOCK

The evening tasting menu, available on selected days, offers 7 courses for £60 per head with an optional cheese course for £10.

There’s also a lunchtime tasting menu of 6 courses for £40 per person.

On a beautiful Spring evening, my partner and I decided to treat ourselves to the optional wine flight too. For £35 per person, you get a different wine paired with each course. This isn’t something we usually do, not least because dining out often means driving. But as it was a shortish walk home (albeit up TWO hills) we gave it a go and thoroughly enjoyed the wines selected for us.

STICKY OX CHEEK CROQUETTE

The first course was described as a Chef’s snack. This was a crispy coated croquette apiece, filled with meltingly tender shreds of rich ox cheek.

I loved the blob of roasted onion and miso ketchup, both sweet from the onion and intensely savoury with miso. For balance, on top there sat tiny dice of fresh and crunchy pickled cucumber.

HOKKAIDO MILK BREAD

You always get really good homemade bread at The Flintlock. Last night it was soft, bouncy and fluffy Japanese style Hokkaido milk bread. If you follow @chefthombateman on Instagram and whizz down his feed to February, you can see him making a loaf of it.

For the tasting menu, we got individual rolls topped with a gorgeously sticky malt glaze plus whipped butter to slather on. A lovely addition was an airily light and subtly flavoured cheese custard made with cheese from the Staffordshire Cheese Company just around the corner from the restaurant.

CHICKEN

Apart from its striking colour, the first thing I noticed when the third of our seven courses was served was its hugely appetizing aroma. But then who doesn’t love the smell of crispy chicken skin?

There were two dinky pieces of boneless, confit chicken wing sitting in a wildly punchy, bright orange hot sauce. It reminded me of West Indian hot sauce, but with a sour and tangy yet fruity flavour of fermented sea buckthorn. This was great combined with the chilli heat.

But when I added dabs of light mousse made with Dovedale Blue cheese (also from the Staffs Cheese Co.): wow! An absolute flavour explosion that I loved. Not wanting to leave a drop, we both surreptitiously cleaned out our bowls with index fingers, licking the sauce and mousse off them.

SEA BREAM

The next course also featured a deeply flavoured, orange-hued sauce. This time it was a curried lemongrass prawn bisque, topped with sea bream.

As I rarely order fish in restaurants in the landlocked Moorlands where we’ve great home-produced meat and dairy, this was one of those instances where, being unburdened by choice, a tasting menu really pays off. The sea bream was expertly cooked: soft and flaky with a perfectly crisp skin.

More crispiness came in the form of a wonderful brown crab bhaji. I reckon a few of these would make a great starter. There was also a very smooth and delicate celeriac puree and celeriac crumb over the fish.

MUTTON

Lamb, hogget, and mutton are something we certainly do well in the Moorlands. I’m a huge fan of that produced by Troutsdale Farm who also supply Dunwood Farm Butchery. Besides being a favourite of mine, Dunwood is also one of The Flintlock’s suppliers. I don’t know whether the mutton I ate there last night was from Troutsdale and/or Dunwood, but it was superb.

I don’t think I’ve ever had mutton cooked other than medium or well done before. I’ve assumed, being from an animal at least two years old, that it would be too tough. But the juicy barbecued mutton loin on the tasting menu at The Flintlock was wonderful. It did have some chew, yes. But not unpleasantly so. Full of flavour, but not gamey, I loved it. Even the fat which, by appearance, you might think needed rendering more, was absolutely delicious.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was also a generous puck of beautifully soft braised shoulder of mutton with huge meaty flavour. That came topped with a whipped butter of anchovy and seasonal wild garlic.

More seasonal loveliness came in the form of Wye Valley asparagus, an almost meaty morel mushroom, and a generous serving of salt baked Jersey Royal potatoes.

Bringing everything together was a tasty lamb jus.

Coming up to the home stretch now, the sixth and seventh courses of the tasting menu were sweet ones.

CHOCOLATE

A chocolate dessert is one of those dishes that, given a choice, I would almost never pick. I do like chocolate, but I find that in pud form it’s often just too sickly for me. But I thought the lightness of touch, combination of flavours and different textures made this one delightful.

They do like their miso at The Flintlock, and you’ll find it cropping up in lots of dishes, sweet and savoury. But I’m not complaining because I love its intense flavour too. The miso crackers sticking up out of the bowl (along with a chocolate tuile) reminded me of those chocolate rice crispy cakes we used to make as kids. Thankfully though, these were not tooth-achingly sweet.

Beneath was a heavenly, soft, and smooth cream of milk chocolate and caramel. Below that was a good blob of caramel. Again, I liked that it wasn’t too sweet. Was there some miso in there too? As coconut is one of my favourite flavours, I was also very happy with the layer of crunchy almond and coconut bits at the bottom of the bowl.

STRAWBERRY

The final course of my tasting menu at The Flintlock was a fun-looking pistachio strawberry arctic roll. It was also incredibly good to eat.

Inside the stripey lime-green and pink sponge was a strawberry ice cream with little crunchy pieces of the dried fruit. Round about were new season’s sweet pickled strawberries and strawberry sauce.

I loved the squirts of tangy yoghurt mousse, an imaginative alternative to the perhaps more expected sweet cream. I don’t know what was in the chocolatey sauce but there was certainly something (a little savoury maybe?) that lifted it above the ordinary. More chocolate came in the form of a leaf-shaped, nicely snappy chocolate tuile.

WELL-DESERVED 2 AA ROSETTES

For my second tasting menu at The Flintlock, I’d enjoyed seven courses of beautifully prepared food. With fantastic, bold flavours, great attention to detail and careful selection of some of the best local and seasonal ingredients, it isn’t hard to see why they received those two AA rosettes.

Starting a new restaurant must be unbelievably hard at the best of times. So doing it during an international pandemic and coping with a national lockdown makes the achievement hugely more impressive.

Having a venue so close to home has meant I’ve been able to watch it develop right from the beginning. Which has turned out to be an interesting, and delicious, journey.

For you folks not lucky enough to have The Flintlock on your doorstep, you’ll be greatly rewarded for making the trip whether local to Staffordshire or from further afield. And I highly recommend you get on board to see where this talented team goes next.

Do you want to try a tasting menu at The Flintlock? There are more dates coming up, evenings and lunchtimes, in June 2022. Go to The Flintlock’s Facebook page for details and book via their website.

MORE EATING OUT RECOMMENDATIONS HERE