It’s funny how a place seems to keep cropping up throughout your life. In the early 1970s I worked as the manager of a betting shop in East Parade and one of my regular punters, who later became a good friend, did the racing commentaries for Extel. In those days it was illegal to have…
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According to their website the word Tattu is a corruption of Tattoo and Tatau, an ancient eastern word meaning ‘to make a mark’. The first thing which makes a mark is the decor. On entering the restaurant, customers are met with one of a series of huge faux cherry trees in full bloom seeming to…
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A few years ago when I was in fairly handsomely rewarded employment I spent a year living in Candle House, the round building in Holbeck Urban Village which looks like a stack of pizzas. It was a great place to live, only a couple of minutes’ walk to City Square and the train station, another…
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I have been writing our Let’s Do Lunch series for two and a half years now and enjoyed every minute of it. After a year I was asked if I would like to try going to press nights to write articles promoting restaurants and I was only too pleased to oblige. Then came, ‘How about…
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Cafe Moor is named after the Muslim people of North Africa and Southern Europe but is now applied to inhabitants of the Middle East as well. I suppose that the people who run this stall in Kirkgate Market can now justifiably call themselves Yorkshire Moors. Over the years I have been to a fair few…
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This lunchtime saw me take a trip to Simpatico, which is a pizza restaurant in Queen’s Arcade. We are so lucky to live in a city where the Victorian architects were so forward thinking as to build these wonderfully ornate structures in order to protect shoppers from the ravages of the Northern climate. I often…
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Leeds in the 1960s had a thriving coffee bar scene. This was long before anyone had ever heard of the leviathans of today, although the chap who owned the Riviera Coffee Bar was called Costa. The salubriousness of the establishments varied from the basic, exemplified by the Ritz on Vicar Lane and the aforementioned Riviera…
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