Tamper Sellers Wheel

This Sheffield restaurant has all the right ingredients – great coffee, good food – so why did it have us hurrying to leave?

If you don’t feel the cold, start skimming now. If, however, you are possessed of an ability to assess a room’s temperature within half a second of stepping inside; if you spend your life dithering between your thick winter coat and your really thick winter coat – read on. You are my people, and I feel your pain. Well, I would bar the fact that, despite the April sunshine, I’m wearing two pairs of socks, a vest and four layers.

It is the cold that stops me loving a warehouse vibe quite as much as I would like. The sight of exposed brick and stripped floors gives me aesthetic pleasure but it also makes me go – oh. As in, oh, within half an hour my lips and fingers will be blue.

And so we come to Tamper Sellers Wheel. It is a laid-back restaurant that is as pretty as a picture. Street art by Faunagraphic dresses the walls, great vases of catkined pussy willow stand atop communal tables, drinks come in jam jars and vintage silver tankards hold the cutlery. At one end of the main room is a bar bedecked with the sorts of homemade cakes that would make the W.I. proud; just beyond is a brew bar that serves all manner of loose leaf teas and Tamper’s own-blend coffee.

The coffee is excellent. There’s none of that horrible, syrupy stuff that gets passed off as “artisan”

The emphasis on coffee makes sense when you clock that Sellers Wheel is run by Sheffield’s Tamper, a New Zealand coffee and dining “chain” (with other eateries on Westfield Terrace and Angel Street) that knows the difference between an Aeropress and a pour over, and which regularly runs coffee making and tasting workshops. The restaurant here is out back, fronted by a coffee bar that serves take-out food alongside its hot drinks.

So, the coffee is excellent – there’s none of that horrible, syrupy stuff that often gets passed off as “artisan” – and the menu is cute. The breakfast list stretches out as lengthily as a Bank Holiday lie-in. Its kids’ menu serves up such staples as “fush n chups” and “fluffy pikelets” (£4 each); there are mini milkshakes for the small people, too, and the attention to options for the kids has clearly paid off in terms of the range of people who eat here: everyone from mothers with babes in arms to office workers and academics from the university round the corner. A grilled portabello mushroom burger (£10) came stuffed with goat’s cheese, and stood on great hunks of bread that towered over a mountain of fat chips, salad and egg. While it wasn’t shout-it-from-the-rooftops great, it was a lunch that filled me right up.

In fact, I was as stuffed as a portabello. This was good grub that stuck to the sides – which was probably just as well, because where Sellers Wheel falls down is in its setting. Housed in a converted industrial building, a remnant of Sheffield’s cutlery-making past, its single pane glass and bare concrete floor had me reaching for my coat sooner than I would have liked. I’ll admit it: I was cold, and that’s a shame, because somewhere as good looking and as easy going as this should be a place to linger. To be fair, all the other (presumably warm-blooded) diners appeared to be doing just that. And maybe I will too, next time, assuming I can lay my hands on my really, really thick coat.