Tempest on Tithebarn

Spring is here, bringing with it lighter evenings, flowers coming into bloom, and new seasonal menus for everyone to give their considered opinion about. New dishes to try, rotation of the small plates, ingredients that you have to Google to identify. It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

The seasonal menu in question is at Liverpool’s Tempest at Tithebarn, who pride themselves on their fresh and local approach, with an in-house bakery and bees producing honey on their rooftop garden. That’s definitely fresh and local. It’s a good looking venue that’s light and airy, with more space than you’d imagine from the outside **insert your own Tardis on Tithebarn pun here**.

And it’s a good looking new menu. It took a while to narrow it down to an appropriate amount to order (from the whole menu to seven dishes). Standouts include the lemon and ginger seabass cooked to perfection and served on crushed seasoned potatoes, a generous helping of salt and pepper chicken bites, and spicy cauliflower with a gorgeously fiery mango habanero sauce. The skin-on shoestring fries weren’t as skinny as you’d expect but that didn’t distract from their taste, and the tempest meatballs came in a delicious herby tomato sauce. Delicious was definitely the most muttered word as we came up for breath in between forkfuls.

There’s always space for dessert though, especially when there’s sticky toffee pudding on the go. The deliciousness continued, homemade sponge with rich sticky butterscotch sauce, crunches of crystalised caramel throughout. It’s the perfect pudding.

For after afters, we pretended that alcohol would somehow counteract the calories and went for a “But First, Coffee”, a zhuzhed up espresso martini that had homemade honeycomb sprinkled on the top, thanks to the bees that live on the roof. We rounded the evening off with an El Diablo – a long refreshing tequila-based drink that’s far too drinkable. Say it with me, delicious.