Fint - the good value Scandinavian restaurant in Leeds

I’ve become increasingly aware since lockdown that the price of eating out has risen substantially. Dinner for £100 plus is not uncommon at the top end and many middle-of-the-road places come in at £65-£70, so when I found Fint offering a three-course dinner for £32.50, I was off to Great George Street in Leeds on the hottest day of the year to see what could be done for such sharp pricing.

Fint, attentive readers may recall, was once called Fettle. Back then it offered a Nordic/Asian/Mediterranean fusion menu with dishes of curried waffle with pickled cauliflower and gochujang miso cream that worked well enough, though smoked mackerel with kumquat marmalade was a fusion step too far.

The backstory is that little independent Fettle could not survive the numerous lockdowns and last year the owners, Simon Hawkins and Kamil Wangin, were forced to close. But they raised the funds when friends and family convinced them to try again. So, with a new name and a fresh new interior, Fint was born.

Kamil, who is of Norwegian and Polish heritage, has designed the interior with white walls, clean lines, blonde wood, a row of backlit mirrors and beautiful Scandinavian chairs. When I first visited Copenhagen I noticed that everywhere, from the tiniest cafe to the world’s best restaurant, looked like this.

It’s not just the chairs, the menu is simpler and more focused, taking in aspects of the “New Nordic Cuisine” propagated by Danish restaurateur Claus Mayer who in 2003 opened a new kind of restaurant using only northern hemisphere ingredients like carrots, beetroot, celeriac, nuts, seeds and berries.

He couldn’t have imagined where it would lead when he took on a young chef named René Redzepi. Redzepi worked with those seemingly mundane ingredients to create Noma, a restaurant that came to be known as the best in the world.

I’m not suggesting that Fint bears comparison to Noma, but the new menu recognises the Nordic cuisine featuring gravadlax, kale, carrots and pumpkin seeds and quietly plays tribute to all those northern-grown ingredients.

Take the asparagus and dill terrine, it’s delicate and fresh and pairs beautifully with a generous slice of gravadlax and some sharply dressed watercress. A vegan starter of grated carrots, pickled mushrooms and a sunflower dip garnished with hazelnuts and nasturtium leaves is fine, though it feels one ingredient short.

Vegans get a better look-in with kale and pumpkin seed ravioli which looks clunky but tastes good. A veal and potato stroganoff is similarly heavy-handed with an over-floury sauce but is appeased by a side dish of carrots and brunkål, which you will of course know translates from the Swedish as brown cabbage. It is actually made from white cabbage spiced with caraway, allspice, bay leaves, thyme and lemon, then cooked down with chicken stock and syrup until dark, sweet and nutty. It’s delicious.

The soaring temperature is melting the tarmac, so instead of the fennel and lemon consommé on the menu, they offer a chilled pea and mint soup, pimped up with a garnish of peas, finely sliced fennel, dill, mint, croutons and a swirl of (un-Nordic) olive oil, all of which adds interest and is just the thing for the sweltering evening.

Sea trout comes with cull yow sausage. What sausage I hear you say? Our server could only tell us, “It’s like chorizo”, though not really. Culled ewes (pronounced yows in Yorkshire) are sheep that no longer produce lambs and are destined for the scrapheap according to the Cornish farmer who fattens them up to produce flavoursome, mature meat. R&J Butchers in Nidderdale turns the meat into cull yow sausage, with a mature meaty, distinctly mutton taste that goes well with the delicate, sensitively cooked sea trout.

To finish, we have honey and cardamom cake that layers cake, cream and strawberries with a hint of cardamom. The espresso cream caramel is less successful – a bland cream with a lump of caramel guaranteed to loosen your fillings. But what saves it is the biscuit alongside. They are Danish peppernuts, a cross between a gingernut and a gingerbread, singing with cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, ginger and black pepper. They are crunchy, sweet and spicy all at once.

There were a few duff notes – the crème caramel and some clumsy presentation, but Fint’s £32.50 menu represents decent value (though a bottle of Albarino was punchily priced at £39). They pay due respect to vegetarians and vegans and the short, more focused menu pays tribute to Nordic cuisine and is all the better for that.

The last time I ate here was in 2018 when I was beguiled by the care taken over a pot of leaf tea served in a china cup on a smart wooden tray. It was this one small detail that endeared me to Fettle. Today the simple, homemade peppernuts show the same sort of attention. Fettle charmed me then and Fint is charming me still.

Fint, 73 Great George Street, Leeds LS1 3BR, 0113 244 3838, www.fint-leeds.com. Open, Sunday to Monday, 10am-3pm, Wednesday to Thursday, 10am-9.30pm, Friday to Saturday, 10am-10pm. Price: dinner for two, including bottle of wine and service, £114.

Welcome5/5

Food 4/5

Atmosphere5/5

Prices5/5