This new tasting menu at a Sheffield restaurant featuring everyday favourites or nostalgic classics costs just £25

Blend Kitchen was founded by its head chef, Chris Hanson, in 2017 with the aim of providing ‘structured hospitality training and paid work experience to people who have been marginalised by a lack of access to rights, resources, and opportunities’.

The restaurant launched its ‘nowt as tight as a Yorkshire man’ five-course tasting menu this week, which costs £25 per head, and features dishes including: beef, cheesy chips and gravy; scampi and tomato sauce and a lemon vodka slush puppy.

Chris explained: “The idea behind the menu is to showcase the talents of the Blend Kitchen team many of whom started as volunteers on one our training programmes and are now employed at Blend Kitchen. We also wanted the menu to be fun, accessible and less pretentious than a lot of other tasting menus”.

While the tasting menu is intended to be accessible, and consists of everyday favourites or nostalgic classics, all of the dishes feature good quality ingredients and will be made to the refined Blend Kitchen standard that diners have come to expect.

One such example is the beef, cheesy chips and gravy dish, which combines griddled 30 day aged rump cap, slow cooked beef shin in a Hendo’s and local stout gravy topped with triple cooked cheesy chips and served with pickled mushrooms, watercress puree and onion rings; and another is their scampi and tomato sauce, featuring whole king prawns with a roast tomato sauce and piperade.

Profits from the sale of the tasting menu will help Blend Kitchen expand their mental health work placement programme, which provides people with a mental health condition the opportunity to work in a team; build up their confidence and progress into further training or paid employment.

Chris said he hopes the menu will help them to raise £2,000 a week for the programme.

"At present we simply don’t have the financial resources to meet the demand for our training, so we really need more customers through our doors spending money at Blend Kitchen to meet the demand,” added Chris.

The menu launch comes after Chris and the Blend Kitchen team raised over £300k during the covid pandemic to open their current Sheffield restaurant on Ecclesall Road earlier in the year. They were based on Pinstone Street in the city centre prior to this.

Thieves have broken into their Ecclesall Road premises twice since it opened in April this year, and a crowdfunder campaign was launched to help them raise £10,000 to help repair the damage caused and further secure the site with new security shutters, CCTV, improved lighting and a new secure front lobby.

The menu will be available Thursday to Saturday evenings from 5pm, and a vegetarian tasting menu will also be on offer.

To book, please either call Blend Kitchen on 01142721455 or visit their website at: https://www.blendkitchen.co.uk/book-now/