Chef profile - Sam Leach, of Nordish in Saltaire

In the months before opening, images posted on Instagram offered tempting glimpses into what was to come, starting with “we’re having a little spruce up and chucking out the chintz”, followed by mouth-watering pictures of pumpkin, rye and chocolate bundt, lingonberry mazarins, smoked wood pigeon Knäckebröd with beetroot and blackberry and roasted fishbone soup.

Sam Leach and his wife/co-chef/front of house Beth O’Reilly have created a very special, Scandinavian-inspired cafe, where pretty much everything that lands on the plate has been sourced/collected on a bike/pickled/fermented/baked by them.

The result looks deceptively simple but it’s clear that a huge amount of work goes into even the Kanelbullar (sourdough cinnamon buns). Despite being a relatively late starter, Sam has form. He was in Simon Rogan’s brigade at Rogan & Co and spent time with Moor Hall’s Mark Birchall, and he’s using a set of skills that equipped him for the rigours of working in a Michelin kitchen. Now he’s in his own place, doing it in his more characteristically Zen way.

Who is your culinary inspiration? It’s probably a bit of a cliché, but it’s got to be René Redzepi. He’s the catalyst that kick-started our love of Nordic cooking and ingredients.

Which cookery books do you use the most? Most recently we’ve been delving deep into our ever expanding selection of baking books. Sourdough, written by the bakers at Ille Brød in Oslo, is probably the biggest source of information and inspiration for us at the moment.

Which piece of kitchen equipment couldn’t you live without? Two pieces of equipment are invaluable to us at Nordish. The first is our vacpac machine, which we mainly use for our ferments and pickles. At the other end of the technological scale, and admittedly not strictly kitchen equipment, is our budget fan heater that we use to prove our sourdough products. Our cinnamon bun production has gone a little crazy over the past two months and we’ve had to find ever more creative solutions to proving them overnight in a controlled and predictable manner. We’ve converted a storeroom in the basement into a makeshift proving room with the use of a fan heater and a £20 temperature controller from eBay. So far it hasn’t let us down.

Who would be at your dream dinner party? Jarvis Cocker for his Northern eccentricity; Bjork for musical entertainment; Bee Wilson (food historian) could keep the conversation flowing with interesting historical nuggets about the food we’d be eating; and chef Gary Usher could bring things down to earth.

What are the plans for Nordish post-lockdown? Since May we’ve been running the “bun club” through our hastily put together webshop, selling a range of sweet baked goods for people to order online and collect each weekend. It was only ever intended as a quick fix to buy us some time and help our rapidly dwindling finances while we came up with a longer-term plan for Nordish, but the support we have received has been amazing – so much so that we have decided to continue with it on a longer- term basis.

Our space is too small to make social distanced dining-in work, at least without losing the intimate and friendly atmosphere that people know us for, so the plan is to essentially become a bakery for the foreseeable future. Perhaps in time we’ll be able to start to bring back dining-in on some level, but for now we need a stable business model that can function whatever the “new normal” (aarrgghh) might throw at us.

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James Mitchinson