'I don’t want to be bored': How Hern became one of Chapel Allerton’s most distinctive restaurants
Hern has always done things a bit differently. The Chapel Allerton bistro has quietly become one of Leeds’ most distinctive dining rooms - the sort of “weird little independent restaurant” where the menu changes constantly, and nobody seems too bothered about trends, only about doing things properly.
At the centre of it all is founder and head chef Robert “Rab” Adams, who didn’t really start cooking until he was 26. “Food wasn’t really something that was important to me when I was younger,” he says.
Back then, he was in a graduate office job in Edinburgh, more used to spreadsheets than service. The turning point came from eating out. “I was just going to quite a lot of nice restaurants and trying to recreate those meals at home,” he explains. That mix of “being exposed to nicer things” and discovering chefs like Fergus Henderson - who also picked up cooking later - made him think it might actually be something he could do as a career.
After a couple of years in London training at Le Cordon Bleu, life pulled him north. Rab’s wife is from Wakefield, and the couple moved to Leeds. Here, sourdough took hold and that obsession became Roops, a tiny bakery in an industrial unit where Rab baked through the night and delivered loaves during the day. “I just decided to open on a shoestring and get an industrial unit and just start baking bread,” he recalls.
The idea was that Roops would “seep into” a daytime cafe and eventually a restaurant. But when he started looking at sites, something shifted. He realised he didn’t want to spend the next decade doing just one thing - even if he’d got “quite good at” bread. Instead, he sold the bakery kit and committed to opening a small restaurant. After months of searching for a suitable venue, he got the keys in September 2019 and opened Hern on Halloween that year - just a few months before the first lockdown.
The menu changes constantly, always adapting to the current climate and sourcing the ingredients that are good on that particular day. “It’s not like ‘it’s summer now, it’s summer for four months’ - that’s not how it works,” he says. This year, extreme heat meant berries arrived early and disappeared fast. “There’s no point trying to do strawberries and elderflower forever if you run out of those things. You have to try and think of something else.”
That approach shapes everything, from desserts that follow the fruit to the way the team uses up the last few portions of a dish on a good-value lunch menu. Rather than clinging to a signature plate with imported produce, Hern simply writes a new dish the next day. “I don’t want to be bored,” he says.
In a dining landscape where many places are starting to look and feel the same, Rab is clear about what excites him. “We need people doing their weird little independent restaurants where they’re not really paying attention to trends,” he said. In Chapel Allerton, with its s hifting menu and stripped-back plates, Hern is exactly that.