WE’VE BEEN eating out quite a bit lately: on a roll you might say plenty of good food to enjoy.But rather than bore you with a bite by bite rundown here are selected mouthfuls.
Let’s start with dinner at newly opened Rosmarino on Abbeydale Road, Sheffield, an Italian in what had been the premises of a Portuguese eatery and before that a Polish one which had a dozen soups on the starters).
It’s their first restaurant together for newly-married Abdellatif, from Casablanca, and his Anglo-Italian wife Lidia. Abdel opened Olive with his brother on Ecclesall Road a couple of years back while Lidia’s family had La Terrazza (now Bella Donna) on Sharrowvale Road.
Unlike many Italian restaurants the place does not feel overcrowded with plenty of space and elbow room between the tables. “We took quite a few out,” Lidia told me.
We ate with foodie friends Craig and Marie Harris, who know a thing about Italian food. My starter of calamari was a wee bit chewy but had a lovely jalapeno and lime jam to go with it (£8.50).
A main of ravioli with a gentle hit of black truffle (£15.95) impressed with its good, firm pasta and lively mushroom and parmesan sauce. We topped things off with a home made tiramusi made, surprisingly, with lemon drizzle cake. It worked!
On to Tonco in Dyson Place, which always makes me think of turnips because they once featured heavily on its very esoteric menu. It always seem to faintly annoy me: must be the irritating Pud-Pud to signal the dessert section!
But a family lunch here was terrific, in particular some courgette and Spenwood cheese croquettes (£6), crispy shells enclosing melting interiors, hogget meatballs wrapped a littlepointlessly in vine leaves (£8) and quite lovely summery goats cheese ravioli in a very simple but effective lemon butter and little gem sauce. Oh and the fig leaf custard tart (they were making those fig leaves work!) with bergamot puree was a great hit, too.
Next stop was a lunch at Trippetts in Trippet Lane, run by one-woman gin Wikipedia (and dispenser) Debbie Shaw and her husband Carl, who can always produce something special with his small plates menu.
Stupidly, I forgot to record the gins but did appreciate a trio of samosas and a duo of sliders (minii hamburgers) made from venison and beef in dinky little buns. I enjoyed the contrast in textures between the two meats.
Finally to The Broadfield on Abbeydale Road where it is always advisable to book, even on a Tuesday night, because the restaurant area gets rammed.
The Broadfield has a better-than-pub-food menu with classics such as home made pies and a Mittel-European-style roast ham hock of the kind you’d find in Prague.
That’s got a lot of calories (the amounts are listed on the menus) so I thought again and had the bangers and mash. Well banger because there was just one but homemade and what a plonker! It was very tasty, the pork helped along with ginger, a very old traditional spice, particularly with bacon. I was glad I chose it. And here’s the picture.
Another helping from Martin Dawes 