Chinzano, Liverpool

I have come to the conclusion that all Italian restaurants set in old railway arches are brilliant. I'm basing this assertion on the fact that all Italian restaurants set in old railway arches I've ever been to have been brilliant, and I see no reason to just write it off as a coincidence. First there was Archway in Battersea, where an ex-River Cafe team serve a menu of exciting Modern Italian food. Then the third (or fourth? Or fifth? I've lost count) branch of Bancone in Borough Market serving house made pasta to a way higher standard you have any right to expect from what is now essentially a chain. And now, underneath what I think is the abandoned track that once terminated at the grand Liverpool Exchange station, is Chinzano.

The first thing you'll notice about the place is how nicely spaced the tables are. We've become so accustomed to being squeezed into antisocially cramped restaurant environments, where you're very often closer to a stranger on the next table than your own +1, that for somewhere to have proper distances between guests is a genuinely pleasant surprise. I'm not necessarily blaming restaurants trying to maximise the return on their floorspace, and presumably the rent in L3 is not quite in the same ballpark as Farringdon or Marylebone, but the fact is that Chinzano probably could have shoehorned in a half a dozen more tables into this room, and that they haven't is to their credit.

Also to their credit is the use of a frozen glass to serve a negroni. Again, not every restaurant has the luxury of the freezer space to store glassware, but it's these little details that make the difference when you're otherwise just one of a multiple dozen places in Liverpool that can mix gin, Campari and vermouth together. And very nice it was too.

And so was everything else. This is an off-menu special of grilled peach panzanella that impressed in many different ways at once. Chunks of crunchy fried bread sat beneath a robustly seasoned collection of summer vegetables, all topped off with a bulb of burrata. It would have been a very enjoyable thing as a straightforward panzanella but the grilled peaches added a lovely sweet/smoky touch and the creamy burrata was clearly top quality.

Another off-menu special was this fried courgette flower stuffed with salt cod mousse, which came alongside a dollop of fantastic aioli. I've had this dish in various places and in various forms over the years, but I can't remember a version as successful as this, packing so much flavour into the seafood element and boasting a batter so light and delicate it was close to Japanese tempura.

Next, an extraordinary take on tuna crudo which ranks as one of the best things to have been done to raw fish I've enjoyed in a long time. Chunks of fresh tuna were bathed in a fantastic tomato and nduja dressing, lifting and highlighting the seafood without overwhelming it and providing an addictive punch of chilli while slices of cool radish on top provided some crunch. This was a bold, exciting and intelligent balance of textures, colours and flavours that demonstrates a kitchen right on top of their Italian food game.

Mains were no less impressive. Pork chop had a beautiful dark crust from the grill but was supremely tender and tasty within, and the hazelnut and potato dressing had all sorts of lovely textures and roasted nut flavours going on. It was also a hugely generous portion - you got plenty for your £26.

And crab taglioni was basically the perfect crab pasta dish - bouncy, moreish ribbons bound with enough brown meat to lend that earthy spritz of the sea, impossible not to love and yet another masterclass in Italian cooking.

Even truffle parmesan fries, a menu item perhaps not winning many authenticity points, were executed superbly - crunchy outside and creamy inside, staying crisp until the very bottom of the bowl, and topped with a healthy dollop of preserved black truffle and shaved parmesan. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention the service, which was as attentive and pleasant as you could want from a waiter who - certainly from behind - bore a striking resemblance to Hagrid from Harry Potter. I hope they don't mind me saying.

There's a whole other half of the menu that we didn't even try - Chinzano make a exciting sounding range of pizzas, with toppings like aged lamb ragu, or confit garlic and herb. And I'm sure they're lovely - and almost certainly worth a return visit - but that's for another time. Purely based on the primi and secondi we ordered, this buzzy little spot tucked away in a strange Victorian-industrial landscape north of the city deserves to be spoken about as one of the best Italian restaurants in the country never mind the North West - it really is that good. So you can add Chinzano to your list of must-visit restaurants today, and if you're ever wondering whether or not a particular Italian joint you may come across is worth your custom, check to see if it's in an old railway arch. If it is, you're probably onto a good thing.

9/10

I completely forgot to take a photo of the bill - I must have been enjoying myself too much - but with a bottle of nice organic white it came to £76pp, very reasonable for the level of cooking on offer.

Pilgrim, Liverpool

As Brits, we largely think of no-frills budget airlines as a way of jetting ourselves off to sunnier places (or more accurately this year, just as blisteringly hot but with cheaper drinks) for our holidays, but are less likely to consider that those same routes might be bring curious and enterprising traffic the other way. Spain may be far and away the most popular destination for British holidaymakers but it's thanks to those airlines and their cavalier attitudes to geographical accuracy ("London" Southend, "Barcelona" Girona) that previously rather culinarily insular cities like Liverpool seemingly overnight found themselves host to fantastic delis like Lunya, where Iberico ham is carved to order and fridges groan with packs of sobrassada and boquerones.

And it makes sense that where good ingredients go, and hospitality-trained labour can travel, good restaurants follow. Pilgrim is the second location for this team, but they seem a lot more comfortable in pleasant, village-y Allerton Road than in the hot and ear-splittingly noisy space above Duke Street market I visited all the way back in pre-Covid times. I enjoyed the food then enormously, but just wished I didn't have to scream to be heard above the din rising up from the food market below. This serene little spot is far more conducive to a pleasant conversation and a small plates concept.

I began with anchovies two ways (my description, not theirs) - a plate of plump boquerones drizzled in olive oil, and an anchovy martini. I can hear some of you rolling your eyes and yes, I know I have a compulsion to order the weirdest thing on any given menu but this was actually a very straightforwardly enjoyable drink with a slight tang of brine which sat very successfully next to white vermouth. Drops of olive oil on the top prettified it as well as adding a little extra grassy note, and I could recommend it to anyone. So there.

At £9 a plate the "Jamon Iberico" was of course not the full acorn-fed bellota but a kind of prosciutto-style presumably made with some variation of Iberico cross-breed. It was still perfectly enjoyable though, the soft and salty protein drizzled with olive oil and topped with crunchy breadsticks.

Octopus with butter beans was a dish so enchantingly authentic it could have been served exactly in this state in any little bar in the suburbs of Barcelona or Girona - add in a row of old men arguing about Catalan politics over giant balloons of sweet brandy and (price aside) you could have been 800 miles away (yes I know Pilgrim are inspired more by Galicia than Catalonia but that is my own reference point). Pickled red onions on top added a nice zing and crunch but the real touch of genius here were the chunks of hot guindillas studded around the place, one of those rare instances where Spanish food allows itself to be properly, eye-wateringly spicy.

Giant Atlantic prawns came with a nice hit of smoke and lots of those lovely crunchy crumbly blackened bits you get whenever you put shellfish in contact with direct heat. Top quality seafood as is an essential a part of the Spanish diet as bread and wine, and dishes like this can be a complete disaster if the main ingredient isn't up to scratch, but fortunately these were very good even if not quite as stunning as the examples you find in Spain.

Tuna tartare was bound with a very clever grapefruit and roasted tomato sauce, hinting towards a kind of ceviche but softer and less citrussy. You also got a lot of tuna for your £15 which was nice to see in these frugal times.

Not pictured (the photo is awful and I won't subject you to it) is roast hispi cabbage topped with shaved manchego and chive butter, which demonstrated again how good this kitchen is at live fire cooking. What I did manage to get a half-decent photo of though are the above Jersey royals, which had been crisped up, doused in salsa verde and served alongside a generous dollop of aioli. A huge portion for £7, they still disappeared thanks to the fantastic mix of textures and technique on display.

The only real mis-step of the evening were these lamb chops, which although cooked accurately to nice and moist and pink inside and with a good dark crust on the outside, were so incredibly salty they were bordering on inedible, snd I have quite a high salt tolerance. Perhaps they'd been seasoned twice by mistake, or someone accidentally knocked a packet of Maldon into the chimichurri (tximitturi was on the menu, presumably the Basque spelling) but they really shouldn't have gone out in this state. Still, they look nice don't they.

The bill, with a nice bottle of rioja, came to £207 for 3 - so £69 per person for plenty of food and wine, not to mention a very competent round of cocktails, which seems to be about right. Service was super friendly and on the ball, and it's a lovely room, with the large windows opened onto the pavement on this sunny day, though I can imagine it being cosy and warm in the winter as well. It's a neighbourhood restaurant that takes itself seriously enough where it matters, but delivers everything with enough of an easygoing charm that you can't help be charmed by the place.

So whether or not the link between low-cost Spanish flights and top-tier Liverpool restaurants can be proven convincingly, I like to think that rather than just being a method of funnelling thousands of pasty Brits to and from the Costas every summer, the ease and relative low cost of travel between the two countries has - despite Brexit's best efforts to sabotage it - forged something a bit more meaningful between these parts of the world. May hand-carved Iberico ham and octopus and butterbean tapas be long here to stay in Liverpool, and may us all be the better for it.

8/10

Barnacle, Liverpool

If it sometimes feels like Liverpool is short on quota of restaurants of sufficient quality befitting a city of its size (something that, fortunately, is increasingly improving), then it can never be said that there are a shortage of beautiful buildings to potentially host them in. The School for the Blind on Hardman Street is a stunning spot - an elegantly proportioned, early Victorian honeyed stone building borne of the golden age of Industrial Age philanthropy. It's an absolutely beautiful thing, and if nothing else it would be worth visiting Barnacle just to thank them for taking on custody of this place and not having it turn into another awful chain bar or hair salon.

And once inside, first impressions were good. Staff were friendly and (initially) efficient, bringing us a nice cold martini (not a frozen glass but you can't have everything) and another very pleasant long drink involving gin and basil ("Barnacle Bill"). A third cocktail advised "Allow 11 minutes" but was worth the wait, a rum and coconut concoction called Lost at Sea which came all frothed up with egg white like a big cold soufflé.

In the meantime, we were served genuinely lovely pickled oysters with buttermilk and dill. There was a time when I wouldn't entertain anything happening to oysters apart from being opened and served raw, but it turns out that when a good restaurant poaches - or batters and fries, or pickles - the things they can be just as enjoyable in a different way. The pickling process here was very subtle, just enough to take that very ocean-y, briny edge off and replace it with something smoother and cleaner.

Miso Scotch egg had a good loose texture, nice crisp coating and the yolks were timed perfectly, which are pretty much the only things you need to get right in a good scotch egg.

The only vaguely disappointing snack were the "cheesy chips", a slightly clumsy pile of skin-on potato wedges and melted cheddar, with the odd sliver of crisp Jerusalem artichoke. Not inedible, just a bit uninteresting and the kind of thing you might expect to find on the menu of one of the aforementioned awful chains. You know the ones, I'm sure.

Snacks and cocktails despatched, we were onto the starters. New Liverpool chowder was a rich, comforting mixture of thick dairy, smoked haddock, clams, potato and sea herbs which was a real highlight. Crisp fried potato skins, Parkers Arms-style, provided crunch and it looked the part with its drizzle of dill oil, but the broth itself was the real star here - everything you could possibly want from a chowder. Everyone who tried it loved it.

Fried chicken tenders topped with Avruga "caviar" was perhaps a slightly less ambitious dish but just as enjoyable in its own way, with greaseless fingers of crisp batter containing lovely white chicken meat, topped with creme fraiche and a generous dollop of the Avruga. It's very easy to make chicken tenders bland and cloying, but these were very good.

Then, we waited for the mains. And waited. And waited. And after about 45 minutes, they arrived. My own venison was good - the meat itself would have benefitted from a bit more of a crust (or in fact any crust at all, the fillets had the consistency of gammon although they tasted nice) but the accompanying sauces were top-notch, both the glossy 'chocolate peppercorn sauce' and the little blobs of parsnip (I think) puree. Fried shallots on top added the crunch that the venison lacked, and kale did its usual job of soaking up the rest of the sauce. Yes, it wasn't perfect, but I still enjoyed this dish - more went right than wrong.

Cod was a little bland despite some potentially good strong flavours - a shame as with a heavier hand with the salt it could have been really impressive. The fish itself was good quality though, and all the accompaniments were cooked properly, it just all needed a bit more attention to seasoning to really shine.

Ironically, flat iron steak had the opposite problem to the cod - it was cooked and seasoned properly and had a good flavour, but was tough and stringy and quite difficult to eat. Still, could be worse - and the chips were very nice.

For desserts, we were relocated to the noisy, crowded bar because, we were bluntly informed, "we need your table back". Don't spend 45 minutes bringing out the main courses, then, is my advice, because it was hardly our fault everything took so long. They didn't even seem that apologetic about it, just needed us out of the way. So I'm afraid our desserts (objectively pretty nice, a rum and banana sticky toffee pudding, and a Guinness and chocolate cake topped with blue cheese and mascarpone) suffered in the context of wanting to get out of that bar, where the music was so loud normal conversation was impossible. And did they take anything off the bill for our trouble? Did they buggery.

So there's plenty to enjoy about Barnacle, and lots of things to admire. The food itself, for example, is well worth the prices they're asking for it, and with a closer attention to service detail the place has the potential to be another mid-budget crowdpleaser in the realm of Wreckfish or Belzan. But I'm pretty sure neither Wreckfish or Belzan would make you feel like an inconvenience for a mistake of their making - an unforgivable misstep for a restaurant with ambitions like Barnacle. And I'm not going to break the habit of a lifetime and score the food and service and ambiance separately, because none of these elements exist in a vacuum - a restaurant is a product of all things working side by side. Can I recommend Barnacle? Right now, just about. Maybe. But there's certainly room for improvement.

6/10

Belzan, Liverpool

This was actually my second visit to Belzan. The first, according to my iPhone photo history, was on 8th May 2020, but was a little bit tricky to review as the building was operating as an improvised deli, with boxes of fruit and veg arranged amongst the booths and benches that would normally be hosting paying customers. Like so many restaurants during the first national Covid lockdown Belzan had pivoted to, well, just about anything they could think of to get them through the End Times and so this friendly neighbourhood restaurant became your friendly neighbourhood greengrocers and wine merchants. I can't honestly remember what I came away with - definitely a box of veg, possibly a bottle or two of natural wine, and I'm sure it was all lovely - but I think I'm confident in saying it's a period of time both they and myself are happy to forget.

Fast forward to 2025, and Belzan is happily back at doing what it's best at - namely charming the pants off lucky Wavertree locals and curious out-of-towners alike. It is utterly impossible not to fall in love with the place, which is close to the platonic ideal of an unpretentious local bistro as it's possible to imagine. Staff all act like they've landed their dream job - which of course they probably have - the menu is full of things that you'd want to eat, and it's all pulled off with such easy grace that you wonder why there can't be a Belzan on every street corner in the country.

I started with a "Peter Piper", a kind of dirty vodka martini involving guindilla (Spanish chilli) pickle juice. Like the best dirty martinis it sailed very, very close to being completely wrong while at the same time just about pulling it off - the pickle juice blasted your senses but the vodka and vermouth just about managed to ground the flavours in something approaching normality. That weekend, in a moment of hideously misplaced confidence, I attempted to make one myself using burger pickle juice and gin. It didn't work.

The bread course at Belzan - sourdough cooked by "Leila", a local who offered their services during that same first lockdown and has been a supplier since - comes with a choice cauliflower butter, a lovely concoction full of satisfying, earthy vegetal flavours, and oil and vinegar, the vegan option but which they'll happily provide alongside the cauliflower butter if requested. You can tell a lot about a place from their bread offering - the attention to detail here was very evident.

Also from the "snacks" was this giant grilled scallop gratin, a lovely plump bit of sweet, meaty seafood (with roe attached I was delighted to discover) draped in bubbling grilled cheese. I don't know why Coquilles Saint-Jacques have gone out of fashion - perhaps they just belong to a period of French cooking that's a little bit looked down on these days - but scallops and cheese definitely need to be a thing again. This was gorgeous.

Courgettes came soft and grilled, with bits of blackened skin adding some very nice detail, and topped with a strong, salty pine nut gremolata. Underneath was a hummus made from butterbean, bright white and silky smooth and the perfect foil for the other vegetables. This is one of those dishes seemingly so simple and rewarding it might inspire you to have a go on the BBQ at home, which one day I indeed may do, albeit perhaps with not quite so much of a cavalier attitude as that with which I approached the pickle martini.

Grilled hispi cabbage was only slightly less successful than the courgettes, possibly because the Lancashire cheese was asking to do a bit more of the seasoning heavy lifting than it was equipped to deal with. A bit more salt on the cabbage and in the romesco and this would have been better, and perhaps it could all have been a bit warmer, but it was still a fun thing to eat, with the little crispy bits of charred cabbage adding more of those interesting textures.

Poached trout came as a giant, well-seasoned and perfectly timed slab of fresh fish and was a joy from start to finish. Underneath a Vichyssoise sauce was full of satisfying earthy flavours and was studded both with runner beans and mussels, the latter being sweet-pickled somehow. Very clever stuff.

And finally from the savoury courses, a huge pile of grilled lamb chops, each blushed perfect pink and so deliriously tender you could have cut them with a spoon. They came on an interesting bed of labneh and grilled nectarines, a vaguely Middle-Eastern range of flavours that worked incredibly well, but the crowning glory was a thick, salty, rich lamb jus that I wanted to bottle and take home with me. If you can tell a lot about a restaurant from their bread course, you can tell even more from their ability with sauces. This lamb sauce was as close to perfect as it's possible to get.

We found room for one dessert, a strawberry choux bun so delicate and light that, when I attempted to cut it in half, flattened hilariously onto the plate, leaving us with a kind of strawberry-pastry Eton mess. It tasted fantastic anyway, you won't be surprised to learn, as did the sweet (but actually not overly sweet) Riesling I'd picked to go with it. Can't leave a place like this without trying a dessert wine - it's the rules.

The bill came to £75 each, which although not a complete bargain (I think the days of restaurant bargains have long gone, with certain notable exceptions) is still great value for the amount of skill and effort that had gone into everything we tried. And certainly, we weren't the only people to think so, with Belzan turning the tables throughout this Wednesday evening, quite a hopeful thing to see from an industry seemingly so consumed with doom and gloom.

So could there be a Belzan on every street corner? Should there be? Let's face it - the trick that places like this pull off so successfully is to make the difficult and skilful look easy and effortless, and if after 7 years they've not even opened a second spot in Liverpool never mind attempted to throw their net wider probably tells you all you need to know about the logistics of running a modern British bistro. But then that just makes what Belzan are doing all the more special - if you want great food, made with care and intelligence and served with a smile, then you will just have to come to Smithdown Road. You won't regret it.

9/10

8 by Andy Sheridan, Liverpool

There are many things about 8 by Andy Sheridan that might rub you up the wrong way. The name, for a start - I've never really been behind the idea of any restaurant being purely "by" anyone; except in very rare cases, these things are surely a team effort, particularly as on this occasion, the titular chef wasn't even on site. And there are few things more off-putting after committing to an evening at such a place than being emailed a giant list of rules, directives and get-out clauses - any modification to the booking less than 7 days(!!) before the event will result the full £120 menu being charged per person, being any more than 15 minutes late on the day is regarded as a no-show (same penalty), only pescatarians can be catered for, not vegetarians or dairy-free or gluten-free... it all tends to give the impression that you're doing them a favour turning up at all, rather than the other way round.

So yes, there's a lot about the place that seems designed to irritate, a certain arrogance and swagger that seems unnecessary or unearned. "Here we go," you might think, "another too-big-for-his-boots regional chef who after a couple of Great British Menu appearances thinks he deserves three Michelin stars and a sponsorship deal with Hexclad. I see your game, matey". As much as I try to approach these things with an open mind there was an aspect of the attitude that strongly invites cynicism. And so it's that much more of a surprise and a delight to report that 8 by Andy Sheridan turned out to be so absolutely, flabbergastingly good.

The fireworks started from the first bite. A delicate little tomato meringue with a fresh, light burrata filling topped with a generous mound of black truffle. Boldly flavoured, perfectly seasoned, and so carefully constructed the whole thing burst into a tomato-truffle-dairy explosion in the mouth, it was the kind of thing so many places can get technically right but forget to add that extra element of personality. As much as I loved much of what I ate at Bo.tic, very often their food was impressive but emotionally underwhelming. That never happened at 8.

Tuna tartare with black garlic, avocado and chilli was another vaguely familiar collection of ingredients that punched way above their weight thanks to an expert balance of textures and seasoning, and a lovely strong chilli kick at the end that made the other elements sing that little bit louder.

And then finally from the snacks, a gruyere, liquorice and almond purée tasting - I hope they don't mind me saying - like a very posh marmite butter, where the liquorice element thankfully limited itself to a faint hit of umami, all offset nicely by a layer of sweet Roscoff onion chutney underneath. The textures were, once again, immaculate - the superbly delicate pastry just about holding itself together until eaten - and the flavours rich and satisfying. As a trio of canapés go, these were pretty much perfect.

Reseated downstairs in a stylishly-lit (ie. dark - sorry about the photos) room containing just 16 seats arranged in front of two large sushi-style counters with a dedicated chef each, we were presented with the bread course, a "Parker roll" with honey and cultured butter. The top of the rolls were glazed with an interesting variety of dried herbs and the bread itself was soft and sweet and as deliriously addictive as anything outside of The Devonshire. And believe me, that's high praise indeed.

The next course was confit trout - a fantastic bit of fish worth the price of admission by itself, but served on a bed of split parsley sauce with pickled green strawberries and fennel it became something even more spectacular. You don't have to do much to one of my favourite fishes to impress me, but here, cooked to buttery, unctuous perfection and in an earthy, vegetal parsley sauce that wished would never end, it was just a world class bit of cooking.

I worry about repeating myself. The problem with the food at 8 - at least the problem for me - is that more or less everything was unimprovable; the absolute best it could possibly be. And although that makes for a great evening at the time - and it bloody did, and then some - trying to convey that reality using my own mediocre vocabulary runs the very real risk of underselling it. This pork belly, for example, pulled apart into satisfying firm layers, and was accompanied by a little blob of hibiscus miso purée on the side and a wonderfully complex sigil pal (a Mayan pumpkin-seed-based salsa apparently) underneath. The flavours were incredible - each bit of it deserving a short novel never mind a paragraph on a food blog - but the star remained that pork, careful ageing providing an amazing complexity.

The pescatarian alternative to the pork belly was this miso-glazed aubergine, which I didn't get to try but was apparently brilliant. As if you even needed to ask.

Seabass next, crudo, in coconut, peanut and coriander. Despite its seeming ubiquity on restaurant menus these days I always enjoy seabass, though I imagine only the best stuff can be used raw like this. The fish itself was lovely and clean and fresh with a tender bite, and the coconut, peanut and coriander made a kind of ceviche which as well as working incredibly well took the meal in a whole new direction, geography-wise. While much of the ingredients that 8 make use of are resolutely local (or at least as local as makes sense in a modern restaurant in 2025), the inspiration for the flavour profiles come from all over the world. If the pork belly was kind of pan-Asian, the seabass definitely looked towards South America.

And with the duck, we went French. Duck and celeriac is a time-honoured match, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you that 8 make a supremely light and smooth celeriac purée and can cook a bit of duck breast to pink, plump perfection. All elements were draped in one of those light summery jus', and I'm very glad I left some of the bread to mop it up because it really was superb. The pescatarians were given the same purée and a very similar jus (presumably one not involving duck) but with hen-of-the-wood mushroom as the main protein, which actually turned out to be even better at soaking up that amazing sauce.

One of the things I've noticed about tasting menu joints over the years is that quite often when the savoury courses underwhelm things tend to get a lot more interesting by the desserts, and vice versa - a kitchen firing on all cylinders for the fish and meat courses seem to lose interest when it comes to pud. This is clearly not always the case but it's pretty noticeable when it happens. Any worry that 8 would take their eye off the ball when it came to the sweet courses was blown out of the water by the arrival of this sticky toffee pudding with stilton ice cream, quite the most brilliant twisting and updating of a classic British dessert that I can remember in a very long time. Without the ice cream this would have been a superlative version, all salty and sticky and gooey and full of everything that makes STP so good. But the stilton ice cream was a genuine work of genius, rich and funky from the cheese but thick and cool and deeply, satisfyingly dairy. I remember saying "I can't believe it" out loud, over and over again until my friend told me to stop.

The rest of the desserts were hardly any less impressive. A little compote of summer berries was paired with a white chocolate mousse and I think was a lemon verbena sorbet, all of it fresh and lovely and full of colour and personality.

But sadly it had to end somewhere and the final dish was an extraordinary collection of techniques applied to Jersey milk - made into crumbs, frozen into a super-smooth ice cream, and even dried and baked somehow into a cracker. Very clever stuff, but as I hope I've made clear by now, never at the expense of joy and enjoyment. Whatever techniques 8 have at their disposal, and by God they have a few, they turn them relentlessly and tirelessly into making their food as good as it can possibly be, from the very first bite to the last.

I realise I'm sounding a bit like I'm writing a press release for them, but food this good tends to turn you into an evangelist. I wish they'd done at least something wrong so I could at least give some kind of nod towards impartiality but I'm really at a loss. A special word should go to their resident wine person Declan who was brilliant company throughout the evening and persuaded me to try a dry Riesling with the sticky toffee pudding rather than the Pedro Ximines sherry I would normally have gone for and turned out to be quite right too, damn him. OK, so I suppose the place ain't cheap - the bill came to £210pp but you still get way more than you pay for. And perhaps I'd have liked to have seen a bit more of this historic building's incredible architecture reflected in the restaurant interiors, which felt a little more "provincial nightclub" than "globally important metal-framed glass proto-skyscraper". But again, who cares really.

The fact is, restaurants like this don't come along very often, so when they do they should be recognised, cherished and - most importantly of all - supported. If you're worried that £200 seems a lot for dinner - and let's face it, it is - remember that there are certain other spots up the Merseyrail Northern Line that will ask for even more, and good luck walking back to your city centre hotel from Ormskirk. 8 by Andy Sheridan really does deserve to be spoken about amongst the very best restaurants in the country, never mind Liverpool, and I can count on one hand the number of meals that have impressed me as much over the last so many years. And so looking back on that rather bolshy confirmation email now I can see that it wasn't so much misplaced arrogance it showed than a desire to protect themselves and their singular offering from the rather terrifying environment they're having to operate in these days. Now, more than ever, restaurants need you, and 8 by Andy Sheridan need you, and all they can offer in return is possibly one of the best meals of your life. And that sounds like a decent deal to me.

10/10