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The legendary La Grillade restaurant opens in Ripon

One of the best known names on the Yorkshire restaurant scene has opened a new restaurant in Ripon.

Guy Martin-Laval, who ran the legendary La Grillade in Wellington Street in Leeds for more than 30 years, has relocated his award-winning restaurant to Kirkgate in the shadow of Ripon Cathedral.

Mr Martin-Laval moved from Leeds because he felt he did not want to pay the high rent demands of landlords in the city.

He also said the “final straw” was when the Leeds City Council food and health team insisted that the restaurant pre-cooked its steak tartare before chopping it and that raw eggs could not be served in an egg shell.

La Grillade’s new premises in Kirkgate offer around 60 covers plus private dining space.

He said: “By buying the finest and freshest products available in Yorkshire, coupled with employing the most highly-trained and caring staff, we believe that the experience of dining at our restaurant will be memorable and unique. At La Grillade, in Ripon as in Leeds, the customer comes first.

La Grillade established a tremendous reputation on Leeds, where the cream of West Yorkshire’s business, media and legal community met to eat, drink, talk and - above all - to relax in the most congenial of surroundings. Mr Martin-Laval has promised to repeat this formula in Ripon.

One loyal customer told Bdaily: “The star of La Grillade is undoubtedly Guy. The very name evokes Gallic charm and glamour, and Guy does not disappoint. He has been running La Grillade for more than 30 years, ever since he took Leeds’s moribund restaurant world by storm in 1981, and has since become a legend in his own lunchtime and dinnertime, too. Leeds’ loss is Ripon’s gain.

Born in Marseilles, Mr Martin-Laval came to Britain in the 1970s and worked as a travelling champagne salesman before moving to Leeds and opening its first French restaurant La Grillade in 1981.

He opened a larger brasserie in East Parade in 1993 before selling it to City Centre Restaurants and moving back to his original site in the late 1990s. He also ran a popular wine bar and restaurant called The Waterhole, in Great George Street and owned a vineyard near Narbonne.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Robert Beaumont .