Veritas Ale and Wine Bar, Leeds

Veritas is behind the Town Hall and after reading about it on The Good Stuff blog, I decided to give it a whirl for lunch. Entering the front door, you are immediately faced with a deli-style counter, where a lot of the meats, cheese and quiche are available to peruse. It looked very tempting and ended up forming the basis of our lunch.

We ordered a bottle of pinot grigio blush, after which I noticed they do prosecco by the glass. I like a glass of fizz so will make sure I order one next time. The Pinot was lovely, however, and was the perfect light lunchtime wine.

For starter I had fried wild mushrooms on garlic toast. I love this dish and often order a version of it for first course. Veritas do it very well, a nice mix of a variety of mushrooms, rather than your bog-standard supermarket variety. Psycho Psu had the carrot and coriander soup.

There are a variety of main courses on the menu and a list of sandwiches. Veritas also do a range of sharing plates – Charcuterie platter, Yorkshire mixed platter and others. If you prefer, you can choose your own from the deli counter and you are charged per item. We chose the latter option and wandered over to the counter to take a look. The woman there was very knowledgeable about the food, explaining what everything was and where it came from. We picked salmon quiche, smoked salmon, parma ham, goat’s cheese, pate and pickle. The plate is then made up and brought to the table with fresh bread.



This was a great grazing opportunity. Sometimes you don’t want a full-on meal at lunchtime, and the sharing platter fits the bill perfectly.



For pudding, we ordered a lemon and lime mousse/parfait. I can’t actually remember the name of it but it had a dense mousse-like consistency, a bit like crème brule, but not!

Veritas do breakfasts and afternoon tea. They also have an “After Eight” menu which are sharing platters for drinkers to nibble on after 8pm. I like the idea of having food to pick at when out drinking for the evening. It seems much more civilised than my pub-going days of scampi fries and pork scratchings. But then I also think that the pub was more civilised when you could enjoy a Berkeley superking with a drink (sigh).