Vetch

Liverpool needs a restaurant like Vetch. High-end restaurants like The Art School Restaurant are great for those buttoned-up destination visits, but Vetch offers a lighter, more fun take on fine dining. A meal here is all about beautiful ingredients and madcap ideas – it’s a must for anyone who cares about food. 

The name? No, ‘vetch’ isn’t a Yiddish-meets-Scouse colloquialism, it’s a plant from the pea family that can be used to improve soil quality. Similarly, Vetch is a vital addition to this laid-back, scenic area of Liverpool – also known, delightfully, as the Knowledge Quarter. (Which begs the question, where’s the Stupid Quarter? Answers on a postcard, please.)

The Georgian-era venue is a treat. Two floors of relaxing, elegant decor, with large windows that fill the room with warm light. It has the casual Mediterranean feel that countless restaurants crave, matched with a refined, centuries-old British aesthetic. 

The brains behind Vetch is local lad Dan McGeorge, winner of TV’s Great British Menu 2021, who cut his teeth at various Michelin-starred and AA-rosetted restaurants across the UK.

At its core, Vetch is all about seasonal produce, matching locally sourced ingredients with Nordic and Asian flavour combinations. 

But more than that, it’s what every good meal should be: fun, with a capital F. The staff are a treat – happy, open and amusing; ideal company for a meal that spans a good few hours. 

There are a few menus on offer: a five-course tasting menu, or three courses if you’re looking for a low-commitment bite to eat. Our advice? Go all-in or go home – Dan’s seven-course tasting menu is full of wild ideas you won’t find anywhere else. 

Better still, match with the paired wines. Sommelier Andy’s choices go beyond the trad “white with fish, red with meat” setup – think bold, tasteful and never boring. 

This creative credo is equally evident in the kitchen. For example, one of the opening trio of amuse bouches is a duck heart glazed with pineapple ponzu, topped with buckwheat crisp. It’s so far from the norm, the norm isn’t even in the same postcode. 

Even the bread is a delight. It’s a pillow-soft Japanese milk bread, teamed with a rich-but-gentle scoop of sweetcorn cultured butter. 

From here, the menu darts about the national landscape, from Liverpool bay bass, to Isle of Wight tomatoes, showcasing everything from truffle foam parmesan to cauliflower chawanmushi. Again: never boring. 

The most outlandish dish is arguably the best. In brief, a piece of fried chicken. In depth, a chunky chicken wing, partly hollowed out and stuffed with a light mousse made from white chicken meat; then the lot is coated in panko breadcrumbs and deep-fried until golden brown; before being drizzled with an aromatic katsu sauce. It even comes in a classic fried chicken takeaway box, and it’s approximately one million times better than anything that so-called Colonel ever came up with. 

Even the cheeseboard does things differently, as Tony Wilson never said. Rather than a challenging slog through four of five lumps of fermented milk, here, simply one. And not just any old cheese, this is a hunk of Baron Bigod, the UK’s best brie-style cheese, and one of the very few in the world to be made by the farmer on the farm. This last point matters – the care and attention put in is evident in the flavour. 

And in a nutshell, that’s the beauty of Vetch too. Dan’s dishes are full of eye-popping ideas that go beyond standard tasting menu tropes and deliver a fresh, original take on fine dining. If the goal is to spark wonder, Vetch succeeds many times over.