03: Pastry Club at Kino, Leeds
"Pie Tasting menu" and the food we do and do not talk about
The way we talk about food online is in bad shape. And it’s not just the “melt in your mouth! cooked to perfection!” crew either (though for the record I do think they should be fired out of a catapult into the nearest wall).
The discourse, by the people with the loudest and furthest reaching voices, is dominated by absolutes and more hyperbole than the body is able to naturally produce, with no room for measured discussion or nuance.
Mundane announcements like a “Popeyes chicken” dark kitchen or another Burrito-Subway concept has to be presented as headline-worthy news and “an exciting addition to the local food scene”.
Your entire personal taste has to be reduced to a list of “Best” places, packaged into no longer than the length of an Instagram reel and recited to a Percival lookbook made flesh outside the Devonshire Arms. “Oooh where’s the best hot honey from?” Grow up mate who cares.
You can’t say things like “the burger was very nice”. It’s illegal. Things have to be the “MOST INSANE” or the “CRAZIEST” and you have to gawp into the camera wide-eyed and slackjawed like a Furby hooked up to a car battery while you open its lid, or slide another bone slides out of another piece of slow-cooked meat, or wring all of the grease out of another burger like a window cleaner’s sponge.
Normal people don’t speak like this. Who has the time to keep a list of 32 “bests” up their sleeve? “the best falafel” is determined by an axis of price vs how far you can be bothered to walk to get falafel. I do not desire “craziness” from my food. I’m mad enough without the gear!!
Very boring and reductive to view food through this lens IMO, and also unfair to the restaurants set in its sights.
Round-the-block first-week queues migrate from hyped up fluffy pancake shops to Wingstop to “Boojum”, leaving a trail of misforecast staffing budgets and stock orders in their wake. What happens when somebody makes a pilgrimage to try “the MOST INSANE birria in Winnersh” and it’s very good! But it doesn’t illicit that stupid fucking Furby face like the man in the video? Whose fault is that? It’s not the hat-man’s fault, is it??
On the reverse side, it’s also bad for us as people who like to eat nice, normal things. Hospitality is hard atm, so you cannot blame operators for trying to appease the content overlords for a bit of quick exposure, but suddenly the “local food scene” becomes an arms-race to be deemed the best or most by whatever dipshit metric is performing that month: wetter meat, more Biscoff spread, golder leaf. They built a mini mall, so we built a bigger mini mall. “Isn’t this mean to be a review of Pastr-” Bear with me we’re nearly there.
One way to avoid being talked about in these deranged terms is to simply forbid people from talking about you at all. Rule one of Pastry Club? Do not talk about Pastry club.
It’s pretty hard not to, though. “Seven-course pie tasting menu” is one of the all-time great hooks. It tests well on all demographics, everybody from my Grandad (loves it, admittedly he probably imagines 7 Weegmanns pork pies, but I’m not going to crush an old man’s dream) to my Personal Trainer (begrudging respect).
It feels a bit pointless even writing about it - you’re either on board with a seven course pie tasting menu from the start, or you’re not. Nobody is getting their minds changed here. I’ve just done about 600 words slagging off the state of food media though so let’s focus on a positive.
If you haven’t been on the receiving end of the unsanctioned yapping yet: Pastry Club. First Monday of every month. Kino, next to Leeds Grand Theatre. As appealing as the old “seven courses of pie” is, it does downplay the effort and imagination that goes into each course.
What you actually get is seven dishes centred around a different type of pastry. A season’s worth of GBBO technical challenges compressed into an hour and a half, all to a standard that would give Paul Hollywood RSI from intense sustained hand-shaking. £45 all in (only £3 more and one course longer than a meal at “Six by Nico” but more on that next week)
It’s all the work of Josh Whitehead, whose CV ranges from an appearance on Masterchef Professionals while working in a brunch cafe, to live fire cooking at Ox Club, heading the entire Harewood Food & Drink Project, a short-lived Gastro pub foray, and now Kino. A split-second look at his Insta feed will tell you that that his passion is pies. Pies with Simpsons-yellow buttery pastry, fishnet-tight lattices, and cross-sections that look like the floor of a grand Italian piazza. and also some vol au vents.
The Fight Club comparisons actually go deeper than the name and rules - there’s an Edward Norton/Brad Pitt dynamic to the food as well. Over seven courses, a clean-shirted conformity to tradition and the natural order of things succumbs to a mischievous instinct to reject convention and burn everything sacred to the ground. The Edward Norton Coronation Chicken Paté en Croute with a Tyler Durden Rubicon Mango jelly raging inside it. Two wolves. One of them spends a lot of time down the corner shop.
Josh was recently selected to cook in the Paté en Croute World Championships at the French Embassy, judged by an Escoffier, a Chef at the Royal Household, and Callum Franklin among others. He was telling me about it over a (also very good) Paté en Croute at Bavette, feeling like he had something to prove cooking such a esteemed cuisine as (his words) “this chav from Leeds”. Maybe he‘d see this as an opportunity to keep the stabilisers on, do something classic and prove himself worthy of acceptance by the bourgeoise establishment? No, this madcunt served them a Fruit & Nut-inspired game pie with chocolate crust.
In a couple of previous visits to the club we’ve had that Paté en Croute with Rubicon jelly (plus a McDonalds-inspired sweet curry sauce), he’s combined resourcefulness with ultra-convenience by serving offal pasties with a bowl of dipping gravy containing blended-up Greggs Steak Bakes, he’s filled double-decker profiteroles with black truffle creme pat (two inescapable themes: Grey Poupon and enough fresh truffle to give his accountant a stress rash) and this month, beef tartare, crisps, and “special sauce” inside a choux pastry which reveals itself as, yep, a sort of raw Big Mac!
It’s tongue-in-cheek. Camp, almost. Especially when wait staff come round with individual mustard pots from Josh’s personal collection to accompany mains, or Josh comes round with an ornate silver dish of petit fours: packets of Rennie cut up into single servings. But the amount of skill underpinning everything prevents it feeling gimmicky, the cheekiness and “lowbrow” nods serve as comfy access entry points to the sometimes stuffy and impenetrable world of French food, and the skill and technicality that underpins it all.
Buttery gougéres flakier than a “maybe” RSVP fight for their life under the weight of cheese, bresoala, “more cheese” (name two better words in a menu description, I’ll wait) and pickled onion. Like a Dairylea Lunchable that pulled its socks up and made something of itself.
The “Lait” and “Riz” courses (if you don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Larousse Patisserie then forget trying to anticipate what you’re going to be served, just strap yourself in and enjoy the ride) both had the same description, which I assumed was a proofreading oversight. Naive! Says more about me than the restaurant. Both of them were versions of duck, foie, cherry, and smoked eel (repeated ingredients? accountant’s stress rash fading…) terrazzo’d into bite-sized sliced of pate en croute with everything on show in the cross-section in one, and the other finessed into a mouthful of gamey blackforest gateau perched in a brandy snap-crisp cone.
A baby-pink ballotine of guinea fowl wrapped in flawless amber puff pastry feels like the chefs clearing their throat during a meeting to remind everybody that we’re here on serious business, actually, and then a cherry blossom and woodruff tart with a razor-sharp currant leaf sorbet shows off their foraging chops, and what they can do without blowing the budget on premium ingredients - but before the accountant puts their E45 back in the cupboard - truffle comes on in stoppage time, piled onto pets de nonne - “Nuns Puffs” or “Dinky Donuts” if you spent your summers at the British seaside - dusted in toasty-tasting panella sugar.
This is my third bout at Pastry Club, the first one in November felt like a clandestine affair full of in-the-know Leeds “food people” behind dark curtains in the bar area of Kino. Fast forward 6 months and the same area is packed out, annd even with additional seating of the ground floor area opened up I still had to call in a favour to get a booking. People are talking about Pastry Club, but as the food shows, this isn’t a place for obeying rules.
We paid £45 per person for the tasting menu, plus drinks. Previous visits have been comped but I’ve tried not to let those affect my judgement.
All of the above glazing is also relevant to the day-to-day Kino menu, here Josh Whitehead is the regular Head Chef. The menu sits in a sweetspot between bistro-gastro-fine dining, but there’s always a Paté en Croute available. You can get three courses for £31 which is maybe the best value meal in the city.
Kino has just announced a series of “Staycation” events - guest chefs and food personalities including Marco Pierre White, Nigel Slater, and Grace Dent are cooking and giving talks, and a week of food-paired cinema screenings. Tickets here.