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Art School Restaurant: Fine (in both senses of the word) Dining in Liverpool

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​When we visited Liverpool recently, we enjoyed a capital-L Lunch like the sort my girl Stritch would sing about at the Art School Restaurant, an upmarket place serving fancypants tasting menus. The restaurant famously offers vegan versions of these menus, so we were like hell yes, fire that sucker up and throw it at my face. Headed by chef Paul Askew, the Art School is consistently listed on Best Of UK restaurant lists and is featured in the Michelin guide. It was also on some of PETA’s ‘Best of UK’ lists for fine dining and even though PETA is trash, I decided to pay it a visit. We booked in and thought ‘hey even if it’s not great at least I can blog about it’ and so here we are. Overall, we had a very nice lunch, although the food needs a little bit of work before I’d be comfortable recommending dining here at its current prices. 

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IT'S A GOOD THING I EAT DURING NORMAL TIMES
The Art School is located inside a building that still has its original 1888 purpose marked on the outside walls: “Home of Destitute Children”. I find it (darkly) hilarious that a place that was once charitably cared for poor kids (I mean it probably didn’t treat them great though, if movies about orphans are to be believed) is now catering to people with expendable income who want to spend it on unnecessary fancy food. Well, during our 24-hour visit to Liverpool a few weeks ago, we were those people. I feel like to make up for this we have to adopt a few kiddos. Or can we just adopt 100 dogs! HUNDO DOGGOS. That’s the dream! Sorry where was I? Oh yes so instead of being the orrrphanage (“I established the first private orphanage in New York City….the orrrrphanage” it’s REALLY hard to stop guys), now this building is an elegant, very white restaurant (in terms of décor/paintjob/clientele) with a very cool glass ceiling, all modern and ready for female politicians to crack through, that lets in beautiful light. Well, I assume it does that; I was too blinded by the too-strong unclouded sun beaming through during this UK heat wave that I couldn’t really tell. 
When we arrived, the host greeted us BY NAME, and we were like...are you a good witch or a bad witch? We figured that we were just the only party booked in at that exact time and that's how they knew, but you can never be sure. They took our umbrellas and led us to our white tableclothed table near the window into the kitchen. It was a nice table right in the middle of the space, but just for future knowledge, to any of you restaurant hosts out there: Chances are someone who has contacted you to make sure you have a vegan menu available is not going to love looking into the non-vegan kitchen. 
Pictureisn't it purdy?
As you can see in the picture of the bit of menu I shared above, the Excellence tasting menu starts with a glass of champagne. While Husbo P was poured theeeee biggest glass of champs I've ever seen, they brought me a non-alcoholic take on a cosmo, a very good sparkling cranberry thing that was like 1% as sweet as what I was expecting with something of that color, so I was very pleasantly surprised. 

The water situation was not as good, as they fell into the common restaurant trap of giving patrons too-small glasses of water - is it to lure you into ordering wine or something? Ain't gonna happen, folks! The water refill sitch was way too slow for me, especially considering how the sun beating through the glass ceiling was baking us alive, so I eventually asked for a pitcher, destroying my facade of fitting in at such a place and not being a camel. 

As is the case with most fancy tasting menus, our meal began with little treats sent from the chef that weren't part of our actual menu. As usual, these little treats were some of the best things we ate! We got gigantic olives, unidentifiable little cracker + puree bites, and two fantastic amuses - olive tapenade inside a leaf of radicchio, and Something Great on a tiny slice of cucumber. 
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amuses for your bouche
Our second little chef treat was an adorable, delicious little cup of autumnal soup. I say it's autumnal because it was orange and carroty and anything that is orange and carroty is considered autumnal. It was served in the most gorgeous little teacup and saucer, which is weird for me to say because china is stupid and I never like it, and not that I want this service or anything but I liked looking at it. And it had good soup inside. Maybe I would have registered for china after all if it came with soup in all the teacups. 
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the color was much nicer in person trust
The tasting menu we ordered was 'only' three courses, as we didn't have that much time to devote to the longer tasting menus on offer (I think there's one where you just get like all the dishes they've ever made). Each of our courses featured a choice between two options. For my starter, I ordered the warm salad of roasted fig, summer leaves, fennel, wild rocket, red onion, sugar and salt, roasted walnuts, focaccia croutes with Mirabelle plum dressing. The other option was braised turtle beans, mushrooms, and leeks, which sounds like my favorite dinner ever, but it also is similar to food I cook myself all the time, and also I like salads at lunch time. 
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warm fig salad
When this dish arrived I was like 'oh that's why you're called Art School!' Definitely the visual highlight of my meal, this salad was very good tasting as well. I don't know what all the spots are but everything was fine. There's no real way to be super impressed by a small fancy salad, but this was nice. 
For my main, I had a choice between the roast celery hearts with pomegranate molasses, herb bulghur wheat, chickpeas, and sesame wilted cabbage; or the marinated pan-fried tofu, spaghetti vegetables, baby spinach, crispy kale, toasted almonds, and girolle mushrooms. I chose the tofu, because you know how much I complain about upscale restaurants not giving vegans any protein, so if I had the option to have a protein-based dish and CHOSE not to have it, I'd be such a hypocrite. (Yes there are chickpeas in the first option but since they're listed as an additional component to the main feature of celery, there would be like 4 of them.)
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all that sunshine was making some seriously weird light
Unfortunately, my choice to stand by my principles left with me a just-ok dish, and so I've learned my lesson and decided I will never choose to do such a thing again. It was weirdly simple to have the dish's sauce just be Chinese flavors, like just a salty soy sauce, and dispensed with too heavy a hand. And I don’t mean simple in a ‘wow such simplicity was brilliant’ kind of way. It was simply tofu and vegetables in too much soy sauce. I love great sauces but these ingredients would have been more impressive served with something much lighter, and less of it. It was fine though.
Dessert was better, mostly because I was won over by the presentation and the fact that they used aquafaba, the water from chickpeas. My vegan option was Claremont Farm strawberry and soy milk ice cream (I think that's the farm the strawberries came from) with yuzu, chickpea meringue, and coconut cake. Oh my goodness, the promise of a non-sorbet ice cream AND cake? and chickpea meringue? I was so pumped. 
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it's p cute
Of course, I jumped to conclusions, as I can't help but do because I love plyometrics so much. It WAS, of course, a sorbet and not an ice cream, alas, but it was still very good. They're lucky English strawberries are so bananas amazing in the summertime. The meringue was the hard, crunchy sort, and since the coconut cake was soooo dry, it would have been better if it was the soft marshmallowy kind of meringue, or if there was some kind of sauce to pour over the cake to soften it. But still, it was overall fine. 

And that's kind of the general vibe for the whole meal. Nothing was bad, it was pretty nice, but just fine. Once we left, Husbo P and I discussed our impressions and we both kinda shrugged and said ‘it was fine.’ And it was fine fine-dining, hence the title of this post do you get it you get it. I think it has the potential to be great, and if you choose the right dishes or get the super-long tasting menu where you try everything, then it probably will be great for you. But with three courses there is too much riding on each one, and when there are little weaknesses, or weak dishes, it stands out too much to be worth the high cost. Still, we’re glad we tried it. It was fine. And I’m always excited to see high-end restaurants using aquafaba. I think if you are in Liverpool and looking for a special occasion restaurant, the Art School would be a good choice. 

ART SCHOOL, LIVERPOOL, UK, EUROPE FOR NOW
Water speed: 
Not great, but they brought me a small pitcher when I finally asked. 
Service: Very nice, as is expected at such a place. It looked like the chef came out to talk to other (older) patrons but not us, but like it's probably for the best. "How was everything?!" It was fine. 
Bathrooms: The bathrooms are small single servings and very nice. However, the door to the hallway they are located in is not marked, so I opened the door to the kitchen by accident. They should mark that freaking door.
Food: Great presentation, decent food. 
Bonus: LIVPOOOOOOOOO. 


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