Brandysnap Bistro: 'I visited a restaurant in one of Yorkshire's prettiest villages - it serves classic food done to perfection'

Pretty Thornton Beck meanders through the village, gliding past the thatched and much-photographed Beck Isle cottage.

More prosaically, it has Matthewson’s, the auctioneers featured on TV’s Bangers and Cash and it has Brandysnap Bistro.

I’m with my friend Lisa, heading to the long-established bistro we’ve never heard of. Lisa is a chef, who prefers to be called a cook, and who, for 12 years between 1989 and 2002, ran the Endeavour restaurant in Staithes.

We often exchange news about restaurants, about new openings, or a change of chef, so how could Brandysnap have slipped beneath our radar?

Perhaps because owners Adam and Claire White have been quietly sending out their own brand of good food without the need to shout about it.

Perhaps because its 25 seats are taken every night, and because it takes three months to snag a table.

So, what’s the fuss about Brandysnap? Don’t come here looking for sharing plates, multi-course menus or Yorkshire tapas.

There are no big white plates with doll’s-house portions, no jars of foraged and fermented vegetables on the mantelpiece; this steady couple leave that to others while they plough their own furrow.

They serve three courses, a starter, a main and a pudding, on three evenings a week, just as they have done for the last 23 years.

If this suggests somewhere dated and stuffy, think again. This is no time-warp restaurant serving garlic mushrooms and lasagne and chips.

Instead, Claire White cooks timeless, classic dishes, very, very well, while husband Adam runs front-of-house, supported by Emily Teasdale, one very polite, well-informed, charming waitress.

There are six starters and seven mains on the menu. They might include a twice-baked cheese soufflé, wild seabass with crab and leek risotto, Yorkshire lamb with potatoes dauphinoise and Homity Pie.

Remember Homity Pie? A homely wholemeal pie filled with potato, leeks, nutmeg and cheese, made popular by Cranks, the first vegetarian restaurant in the UK that opened in 1961.

It was the Crank’s Recipe Book that taught us that vegetarian food could be delicious.

I pass on the Homity Pie in favour of something lighter: a salad of warm poached pears, with Roquefort and pecans.

It’s a classic combo and for good reason, the tangy, salty Roquefort works with the subtle sweetness of the poached pears. The pecans add texture and the watercress gives a peppery finish.

It’s a lovely seasonal, autumnal dish.

Unlike many restaurants, the understated Brandysnap don’t bang on about regional and seasonal, they take this as read, but a closer look at their October menu reveals a celebration of autumn fruits: parsnip and apple soup, honey roasted duck breast with a spiced plum sauce.

A sweet apple and pear chutney is served with Lisa’s starter of duck rillettes. The coarse, meaty pâté comes with fingers of sourdough, and like the pear salad, the sweet and savoury work harmoniously, making good use of this year’s bumper harvest.

After our starters, we dither over mains. We could happily have eaten everything on the menu.

It’s a menu reminiscent of Lisa’s Endeavour: the wild halibut with tarragon sauce, seabass with crab and leek risotto, Yorkshire lamb and dauphinoise potatoes; beef and mushroom stroganoff.

Enduring dishes that Lisa was cooking in the late nineties and stand up just as well today.

Lisa goes for a beautiful and generous piece of sweet white halibut, perfectly cooked so that it flakes easily, given a contrasting saltiness from bacon and a mild and earthy bitterness from Savoy cabbage.

It’s all brought together with a herby cream and lemon sauce and the aniseed notes of tarragon.

My dish is a textbook slice of belly pork. The fat is rendered down so that the skin is as thin and crisp as toffee, while the pork beneath remains juicy and tender.

On the side, pork fillet has been stuffed with black pudding. It’s served with a smooth, mustard-flavoured mash and given a cream sauce, sweetened with cider.

Here is food that embraces the classics and cooks them to perfection.

All dishes come with vegetables: a dish of carrots, broccoli and parsnip. I claim they are unnecessary. Portions are plentiful and dishes complete in themselves.

Lisa thinks they are a thoughtful, generous touch. We nibble on a parsnip or two, but the dish goes back to the kitchen barely touched.

We deliberate over the puddings, a roll call of enduring favourites: raspberry and white chocolate crème brûlée, whisky laced bread and butter pudding, profiteroles with a dark chocolate fudge sauce, sticky toffee pudding, apple and pecan crumble and of course, a brandysnap basket filled with ice cream, butterscotch sauce and ‘drenched’ in Bailey’s liqueur.

There’s also a choice of ice cream, not just your usual vanilla, but cinnamon, lemon meringue, prune and Armagnac or blackcurrant and liquorice.

After two courses, proper platefuls, we are beyond pudding and settle for a jug of coffee served with a mini brandysnap and a square of chocolate fudge, which proves just enough sweetness to round off a first-class dinner.

Brandysnap is congenial, big hearted, and generous, the cooking, spot on. But they don’t need me to tell them their little bistro is very good.

They have been running it successfully for the last 23 years, a record that many a restaurateur would envy.

Their success lies in providing people-pleasing dishes with a menu that doesn’t have to be explained, nor food that requires us to be reverential.

It’s just good food without pretension at a reasonable price. Their strapline is ‘fine homemade food’ and Brandysnap more than fits the brief.

Welcome 5/5

Food 5/5

Atmosphere 4/5

Prices 5/5

Brandysnap Bistro, 3 Whitbygate, Thornton le Dale, Pickering YO18 7RY www.brandysnapbistro.co.uk

£120 Dinner for two including bottle wine and service.