Crown Street restaurant

A very short late October walk to the hometown staple for this review. A sit-down at Crown St costs £6.95 and comes with bread and butter plus tea - which is a shame because I don't like tea!

The fish tasted incredibly fresh with lovely big flakes but it might have been a tad overcooked. The batter was crispy and flavoursome and held its shape really well. Sadly the chips needed cooking for longer, which is a perennial problem at Crown St, but they tasted fresh even though they were anaemic. Didn't have any mushy peas this time so no comment to make on this but in terms of the extras the lemon was surprisingly big, the tartare was a packet of nonsense and the bread was a bog-standard sliced bread.

However this is the go to fish and chip restaurant in town and we will return many many times in the future.

Haworth Steam Brewery

An early October trip over the hill to Haworth and some fish and chips in the  Haworth Steam Brewery.

Playing the safety first game I elected for the small Yorkshire Fish & Chips, deep fried in their own “ True Tyke” Yorkshire beer batter, as I have far too much experience of not being able to finish the huge portions that are occasionally provided for a Yorkshire based F+C fan. It was a perfectly good portion and at £5.95 pretty good value.

The fish had a very good texture and taste, the batter was light and crispy but a little undercooked and lacking flavour. The chips seemed to have come from a factory and therefore didn't have much personality but were very well cooked. The peas tasted homemade with great texture, a real depth of colour and flavour - fine robust mushy peas! Sadly the tartare sauce was again of the off-the-shelf variety and this particular version had no texture and was far too vinegary. The lemon was a good size and came with a large and frustrating population of pips whilst the salt dispenser also brought its own ergonomic challenges and the vinegar was more off-the-shelf nonsense.

Overall a perfectly pleasant experience. The door was permanently open and as I'm not as hard as Yorkshire folk it made for a pretty cold and drafty eating experience which wasn't helped by having to listen to the joyous sound of a Radio 2 1960s music show, but the stunningly good beers from the pubs microbrewery were outstanding and will will be returning in the future - and I'll be having the F+C yet again!

I'd noticed that there was some contemporary art on at the Brontë Parsonage Museum which was recommended in the Guardian and as I got in free we went along to see 'Ways to the stone house' by Simon Warner. Most of the work used iPhones, sat on the displays in the rooms, to bring beautiful films of evocative Pennine landscapes into the spaces and there were some fabulous photos by Alexander Keighley, Bill Brandt and Fay Godwin on display in the exhibition space.