A Bite To Eat: Jamie's Italian, Leeds

I know I normally blog about tasty eats around the North East, but sometimes it's nice to cast the net a little wider. A few weeks ago, we travelled down to Leeds to visit my brother and, as it also happened to be Father's Day, we stepped out for something to eat.

Leeds is a city filled with excellent restaurants and bistros, but as we were having a lazy time of things we opted for somewhere close to my brother's abode - so Jamie's Italian it was!

The restaurant itself is a converted bank building and elements of the original architecture have been cleverly incorporated into the new setting. 

Just inside the entrance, a staff member was making pasta - I always love it when restaurants let you peek 'behind the scenes' at how things are made.

As we waited to order, I was quite impressed by the attention to detail - the cool typography on the menus, the bespoke bar towel style napkins and some particularly beautiful flooring tiles!

As we were feeding a crowd, we ordered one of the sharing 'planks' to begin with (which came stacked on top of Italian tomato tins). The bread plate was a delicious smorgasbord of artisan loaves (cut from a bakery style selection in the centre of the restaurant). The plank itself was filled with the usual tasty meats, cheese and olives - the standout dish for me was the beetroot, carrot and mozzarella salad, both sweet and creamy and some of the tastiest cheese I've had in a long time!

For my main, I tucked into 'Honeycomb Cannelloni Three Ways' - tasty pasta parcels filled with aubergine, sundried tomato, pumpkin, ricotta and spinach. The sweetness of the pumpkin sat wonderfully alongside the creamy cheese. I polished it off pretty quickly - hence the slightly blurry pic, clearly I was too excited to tuck in!

For dessert, there was a super delicious chocolate pot. There's no picture because I was way too excited to eat it. Je ne regrette rien. I'm a dessert girl.

All in all, a tasty feast at a reasonable price. This was not my first trip to Jamie's Italian and I'm sure it won't be my last - the only downside being we had to go all the way to Leeds to eat there. Open one in the North East please Jamie!