Ilkley Restaurant Guide

“You have to like old-style comfort, cuisine and experience” but hitherto there’s been “nowhere better” than Simon and Rena Gueller’s “traditional and cosy” bastion (opened in 1962): “a proper restaurant, doing proper classical food, with proper service and a proper wine list”, which on all accounts has been “on top of its game” of late… so we were all the more flummoxed by Michelin’s decision to remove its star in October 2018! Soon thereafter, chef Kieran Smith parted ways, Simon Gueller said he was returning to the kitchen, and then immediately thereafter that came further news that Gueller had snapped up Samira Effa from Alimentum, when it was announced that the Cambridge restaurant was unexpectedly closing down. Alimentum was known for its cutting edge culinary style, whereas here it’s always been “the absence of dry ice and other fripperies” that folks have loved so much, so whether the contemporary shift such a move presumably entails goes down well remains to be seen. Constants, though, are the “amazingly broad wine list” (“enviable breadth and depth, and if you look hard there are some fair prices in there”), and “one of the most knowledgeable sommeliers around”, Didier da Costa.