Deacon's Bank Review

Opened in the summer of 2023 in the small Derbyshire town of Chapel-en-le-Frith, Deacon's Bank is a restaurant with a growing food reputation. Alongside glowing reviews from regular punters, the award of two AA rosettes in May this year was swiftly followed by a Michelin Guide listing in July too. I was therefore pretty confident of receiving a high quality meal, as I made the relatively short trip to visit for lunch on a surprisingly mild September Friday.

The restaurant sits on the main road through the town and doesn't have its own car park (not many former banks do in fairness), but there is plenty of free parking in the area; we stopped off at the Miry Meadow Car Park which is around a three minute walk away. The venue looks smart on the outside and that theme definitely continues inside, it's clear a lot of effort went into the renovation here and the result is suitably impressive.

The welcome on arrival was warm and friendly and as the first in the restaurant, we were given free choice over where to sit. There was no offer to take coats or to provide water for the table, but I think that was just a little oversight with us being the first guests of the day, as all tables who arrived after us were offered these things.

I'd been a little bit confused by the menu choices available when booking; their website states the carte is only available at dinner but on social media posts the restaurant states it's available at lunch too. I left a little note when booking that we'd prefer to eat from the carte and that turned out to be no problem at all. The carte offers a good amount of choice with five starters, six mains and five desserts available for our visit.

Drinks wise there's not a massive selection (including a fairly minimal non-alcoholic offering), but I was perfectly happy with a couple of Forest gin and tonics during my meal, whilst the best option my wife could find (as a non-drinker) was lemonade.

Lunch began with a feuille de brick cone snack filled with goats cheese which was pleasant enough, followed by a single plaited bread roll (between two of us) with a couple of tasty butters. You have to give credit to the restaurant for making their own bread but although the flavour was nice, it was doughy and underbaked, plus one roll between two of us (with one butter knife to share) felt a little bit stingy.

First up of the meal proper for me was the crispy cod served with a warm tartar sauce. This was a very enjoyable little bowl, the fish cooking was spot on and the sauce was delicious. My only complaint was I wasn't provided a spoon to eat the sauce and the portion size for a carte starter was definitely on the small side. My wife enjoyed her goats cheese mousse tartlet served with beetroot and apple; it was nicely presented and perfectly pleasant on the tastebuds.

For mains I opted for the venison (at a £5 supplement), including a venison scotch quails egg, pomme anna, squash and spring onion. This was a decent main course, the scotch egg was the highlight for me but the venison cookery too was solid and overall the plate ate well. My wife went for the pork fillet wrapped in prosciutto, accompanied by apple, celeriac and leek with a honey and mustard sauce. She really enjoyed this and said it was one of the best main courses she's had in a while, high praise indeed.

After some impressive savoury courses, there was little chance of us leaving without dessert but unfortunately these didn't quite reach the same heights as the food we'd been served previously. My dessert consisted of jigsaw shaped pieces of mascarpone mousse, with flavours of chocolate, coffee and pistachio. It was a pretty inoffensive dessert, but the mousse was a bit too solid and it really lacked the flavour punch I'd been hoping for.

My wife drew the short straw on this occasion with a dish of yoghurt and buttermilk pannacotta, with blackberries, a vanilla sponge and honeycomb. This dessert was not executed well; the main event (served, to be frank, as two turd shaped tubes) was way too gelatinous and not pleasant to eat, and the other elements didn't come close to saving the dish, including some remarkably flavourless blackberries.

That as they say was pretty much that, and after a couple of decent coffees to finish (served with a little short bread biscuit each), an enjoyable lunch came to an end. Although there were one of two issues with the food, the cooking overall was certainly of a good standard. The menu pacing too was impressive; we were all done in around an hour and fifteen minutes which is swift for three courses at this level of restaurant for sure. Some might even argue that kind of pacing is too quick, but it was absolutely fine for us.

Service too was fine and there was no problem collecting the bill at the end, and our £10 per person deposit (collected when I booked online) had been deducted without issue. There wasn't any automatically included service charge and our waitress skipped past the optional gratuity question on the card machine (maybe that's a reflection of the local market, or perhaps I just look tight) but fortunately I had enough cash on me to leave a tip.

Overall, this was an enjoyable visit that I'd be happy to repeat; it's an impressive venue in an area not exactly renowned for leading restaurants, and there's some thoroughly decent food coming out of the kitchen too. I wish the team lots of success and look forward to following their progress.