Roots Farm Shop and Café, Home Farm, East Rounton , Northallerton

IT’S been a dreadful January for anyone involved in the hospitality business.

Traditionally a quiet time of the year following the excesses of December, the bad weather during the first fortnight kept any folk with a few pounds left in their pocket at home. We suspect there may be a few casualties in the pub and restaurant trade in the coming months It was gratifying therefore to arrive at Roots Farm Shop and Café at East Rounton, near Northallerton, last Saturday lunchtime to find the place pleasantly full. We bagged the last available table; a few minutes later there was standing room only.

Roots opened 18 months ago, the latest in a line of farm shop openings which have contributed to a new appreciation of the practical benefits of seasonal local produce.

What makes Roots rather special is the building it is housed in. Ostensibly just a outbuilding, it is part of the farm which was included in the model village of East Rounton built by the Teesside ironmaster Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, who hired the father of Arts and Craft architecture, Philip Webb, to design many of the buildings on the estate Webb’s work included the big house, Rounton Grange, demolished in the 1950s after the Bell family fortunes were decimated by death duties.

The farm shop and café is in one of the low, red-brick and pantile buildings behind the farmhouse on the road out to the A19. Thanks to barn doorshaped windows, customers look out on to the working farmyard, which helps to reinforce the connection between what they are eating and where it came from. That it is a working farmyard was vividly illustrated by Sylvia’s pained expression and clenched nose as we got out of the car to be enveloped by the smell of cows doing what cows do – she’s a town girl at heart, it has to be said. Once inside the café, she recovered from her fit of the vapours sufficiently to approve of the light, unfussy interior very much in tune with the exterior of the building. The comfortable Lloyd Loom-style chairs add to the period feel.

The menu offered simple dishes with sandwiches, baked potatoes, and quiches featured. There was also a soup of the day – celeriac and red onion – a lamb stew with redcurrants and a beef burger with Wensleydale cheese and onion relish.

We noted a number of fellow lunchers were tucking into the soup enthusiastically but, alarmed by the puce colour, opted for the stew (£6.25) and the burger (£5.95).

Sylvia thought the stew very good, not least because someone had the courage and lack of pretention to call it a stew, rather than something more poncey. The lamb pieces were chunky, tender and bathed in a velvety-rich gravy, sweetened by the redcurrants and bulked out with winter vegetables. She would have like a few more potatoes (she always wants a few more potatoes) and for it to have been served a little warmer. It wasn’t exactly cold, but, like my mother, she subscribes to the theory that a stew’s nutritional goodness declines as it cools from the optimum mouth-scaldingly hot. There were no complaints about the generous hunk of fresh bread (from the Village Bakery, Stillington) supplied to soak up the juices.

The burger was clearly 100 per cent beef, still slightly pink in the middle, and served with a winter leaf salad, Pipers’ crisps (from Anglesey) and a nicely sharp honey mustard dressing. Although Wensleydale cheese has the obvious merit in being local, I’d question its use in a burger. Its crumbly texture didn’t help hold the burger and bun together, even with the assistance of the onion relish. The niceties of burger construction aside, it was excellent.

Slightly perversely given her miffedness over the serving temperature of the stew, Sylvia finished with a little pot of Archers (Walworth Gate) strawberry ice cream (£1.60) which she thought had been sitting in the freezer a little too long, which was perhaps something to do with it being January.

I stuck with the winter theme and a splendid bowl of apple, rhubarb and gooseberry sponge (£3.99) which came with custard served in a quantity Billy Bunter might have described as “lashings”.

The sponge was light yet side-stickingly more-ish.

With a bottle of Fentimans (Newcastle) traditional ginger beer (£1.85) which I realised later they omitted to bill us for, the cost of the meal was a little shy of £18 – a sum quickly doubled by the goodies crying out to be purchased in the adjacent farm shop.