Livebait Restaurant, Leeds

Livebait serves purely seafood so if you love fish this place is perfect for you if your not a fish fan don’t bother reading any further.Livebait brings its famous “fresh fish with a difference” to Leeds. The mouth-watering menu offers an excellent choice of shellfish, including the celebrated Classic and Livebait platters. That’s what the website stated and I wasn’t disappointed. This was my first visit I had seen the huge sign from the side of the road and heard numerous people at working talking about it so I thought I would try it for myself. When you approach the restaurant it looks like its an old warehouse building. There is seating out side but the evening we went was rather chilly so we decided to eat inside and to be honest I thought the view outside was not particularly appealing its quite close to a busy main road. Once inside it was much smaller than I had imagined the walls are bare brick and tiled floors and glass counter seem quite cool i believe they were going for a trendy, clean look which might have worked if it wasn’t for the odd cobweb and torn seat my dinning partner noticed. So I was slightly disappointed with the decoration but the service and food certainly made up for it. The menu consist of fish, fish and more fish. The menu has a wide range of dishes from the plain and simple classic dishes like prawn cocktail, fish and chips and seafood pie to the much more exotic tiger prawns in a Thai chill sauce to fish platters if you really fancy pushing the boat out excuse the pun but they were quite pricey starting at 28.50.I started with rope grown Scottish mussels mariner white wine and shallots. I got a much larger portion than I expected and the were delicious. My partner had char grilled tiger prawns but was disappointed with the portion and started to steal my mussels. For the main course we both opted for the chef special of the day which was a prawn and pasta dish which was enjoyable but towards the end I found the cream sauce slightly too rich I think maybe there was too much sauce but we both agreed it was very nice. I felt I should sample the dessert and when for chocolate cake with ice cream which was lovely but I would have like another one afterwards. All this with soft drinks came to 52 pounds including the service charge. The service was good the staff were helpful and friendly and I always think cloth napkins and finger bowls are nice so we were happy to pay the service charge. Overall I had a good experience and would recommend it as the food was excellent.

First the good: it is a lovely, charming restaurant. The bad: the food was mediocre, my fish soup was no more than fish-flavoured water, no lovely chunks or anything to bite on and my main, sole goujons, was greasy and uninspiring. The staff were slow and inefficient. Way overpriced. I won’t be back.