Liverpool is known for its music and football but the food scene is vibrant, too. This budget eats guide to the city highlights a raft places where you can eat well for under £10
The Garden at FACT
Arts space and cafe LEAF was included in Guardian Travel’s first «budget eats» guide to Liverpoool, in 2008, and is still going strong, albeit at a new address. In the meantime, owner Natalie Haywood has branched out at the media arts centre, FACT, and at Oh Me Oh My, a weekday cafe in a grand, Grade II-listed property opposite Liverpool’s totemic Liver Building. LEAF and FACT are natural allies – way beyond their preference for upper case logos – and last year cemented their union when LEAF opened the Garden cafeteria at the centre.Its menu is broadly vegetarian, revolving around sandwiches, Ottolenghi-ish salads and daily specials executed with LEAF’s usual foodist rigour. For £3.95, I picked-up a «small» (in fact, quite substantial) box of mixed salads and focaccia that included a terrific riff on preserved, chargrilled artichoke hearts and a lovely honeyed parsnip and walnut coleslaw. All this is available to take away, but, on a clear day with the sun streaming through FACT’s glass façade, the Garden, with its fresh flowers and plants, and friendly staff, is a pleasant place to linger over lunch.
Moose Coffee
If you want to breakfast like a king – or The King, for that matter – head to this US-inspired cafe, which does a fine line in stacks of pancakes and waffles topped with bacon and maple syrup. Elsewhere, its extensive all-day breakfast menu runs the Stateside gamut from garlic- and cheese-laced grits, via a minute steak with homemade hash and eggs to the «Coney Island», a pulled pork-topped breakfast hotdog. Portions are large and ingredients first-rate. Service is cheery and obliging and the soundtrack (beards ‘n’ banjos, faux-backwoods Americana) fairly innocuous. Moose will open a third Liverpool branch (there’s one north of the centre in Crosby) on Hope Street, later this year.
Lunya
From colourful tableware to sensational, fennel-spiked chorizo sausage rolls, there isn’t much you can’t buy in Peter Kinsella’s Spanish deli-restaurant. On my visit, the kitchen had even knocked up a Catalan take on Liverpool’s signature stew, scouse, in honour of Global Scouse Day. The daily lunch offer (three tapas and bread, £10.75) is good value. Alternatively, you can take away all manner of snacks and salad-y things, tortilla, cakes, as well as hot sandwiches stuffed with morcilla(blood sausage) or, say, Catalan butifarra sausage and fig chutney. Do not miss the patatas aioli, a creamy concoction of half-mashed, half-crushed potatoes loaded with garlic. Comforting, next-level stodge, I could eat it by the bucket load. Talking of great value, set-lunch deals, the nearby Salt House is another excellent, if less slavishly authentic Liverpool tapas joint.
Bakchich
Think of Bakchich as a Lebanese Wahaca or Barburrito by way of Beirut. It serves decent Levantine street food – meze, falafel and shawarma wraps, chargrilled meats – in a bright, buzzy restaurant at very keen prices. The advertised hummus in my lamb kofta wrap had, somehow, mutated into garlic sauce and I’m not sure how authentic it is to bulk out a Middle Eastern sandwich with chopped lettuce but the star of the show, the kofta, was delicious. A long, gloriously moist snake of meat, it had a nice chargrilled edge, a quiet heat and was packed with fresh herbs. For £4.95, it hit the spot. Just around the corner from Bakchich, you will find Club Pizza, a spin-off from the well-regarded Italian Club.
Bold Street Coffee
Even in the best third-wave coffee haunts, the food is often an afterthought. Not here: a pot of fantastic soup (thick, creamy winter vegetable and pearl barley) comes with two slices of high-quality, generously buttered sourdough. At this level, that kind of attention to detail impresses. Likewise, Bold Street’s interesting salads sing with true, clear flavours. These could include purple sprouting broccoli, flagelot and hazelnut, or chickpea and olive with roasted peppers, mint and basil. It also serves posh sandwiches (say, salami, brie and homemade tapenade) and, at breakfast, appetising dishes such as homemade fruit loaf and apple-cinnamon French toast. With its hastily painted signage, low-hanging filament lightbulbs and deep house soundtrack, it might be thought a bit trendy by some but the staff could not be nicer. A sample flat white (£2.60) was very good: the texture silky, its flavours well-balanced.
The Guardian