Moods, Leeds LS2: ‘Puzzling, if not quite a car crash’ – restaurant review | Restaurants

I’ve done some fairly rash things in my time, but I’ve never popped into anywhere for king scallops with ’nduja and come out with a swallow tattoo on my neck, though what is this life without adventure? Which is where Moods comes in: the space is an all-day restaurant, bar, tattoo parlour and hair salon in Leeds, offering violetta potato with ox cheek, a short back and sides, and the chance to tattoo “Mum” on your lower left arm, all in one Grade II-listed building.

It occupies the former First White Cloth Hall on Kirkgate, built in 1711 for the trade of white undyed cloth. This cavernous ark, with roof timbers dating back to the 1470s, lurked on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk register for more than 20 years, during which time it was under almost constant threat from the bulldozers. It took the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Leeds Civic Trust and Rushbond, a Leeds-based developer with a penchant for rescuing buildings, to drag it out of danger. Then Will and Hayley Moody arrived, slotting in their Buzz Club Tattoo Studio and a hair and beauty salon called Self, and now, on the ground floor, there’s Moods, a kitchen reportedly run by Craig Rogan. Laugh at the tattoo/hair/dinner triumvirate, if you want (I know I did), but it’s a grim joke that we treat our old buildings like this, and that hospitality is in a state so wild that this seems to be the solution. Bring on the bright new future of ye olde small plates, buzzcuts and half-sleeve emporiums, all under 400-year-old timbers.

Moods is incredibly cool, which I know immediately because of the gorgeous amounts of disdain with which I’m treated by the receptionist when I pop by at 2.30pm to try the all-day menu. She looks at me bamboozled, as many Gen Z-ers do, as if I have announced myself as an intergalactic equerry from Zarg requesting the keys to a plutonium source. Eventually, I’m tucked away by a wooden dresser that’s used as a base for cleaning supplies and cutlery. Only 42 other better tables are lying empty.

The all-day menu looks rather fabulous, though. There is a wild mushroom crumpet with Old Winchester and black truffle honey at £14. There is mead-glazed pancetta with potato rösti and mushroom ketchup, as well as fried chicken brioche with elderflower and pickled cucumber. And all of it cooked by Rogan, Simon Rogan’s son, trained by his father at L’Enclume and at Fera at Claridge’s. He’s channelling this greatness via osmosis; I can smell it in the air. Well, that and Jangro spray sanitiser.

Doubtless Moods is a fabulous place to drink cocktails at the long open bar in the centre of the room, where the signature peach melba comes with caramelised peach vodka and ice-cream foam. But the food proper turns out to be more of an uphill struggle. I order that crumpet, envisioning ceps, girolles, perhaps a random morel, on a home-baked sourdough crumpet with good butter. What arrives resembles nothing so much a Warburtons Giant Crumpet topped with chopped chestnut mushrooms fried in butter and a few herbs, and a big handful of cress. The buttery mushroom liquor has soaked into the crumpet while it waited, and it now has the texture of a damp Always Ultra. And where is the Old Winchester?

Next up, oak-smoked salmon with rye bread for £16: two tiny triangles of fish are draped over a shedload of creme fraiche– at least seven tablespoons of the stuff –a bit of roughly chopped kohlrabi, long pieces of chopped apple and yet more cress. If there are traces of the advertised yuzu and dill in here, they are destroyed by the sheer volume of cream. It is puzzling, if not quite a car crash. Then again, I was in an actual car crash once, and I definitely enjoyed the Sugar Puffs they gave me with my 10am discharge papers a lot more.

Writing all this off as a bad start, I return the next morning for breakfast, hoping to make more sense of the place. From the outset, things do not look good. Breakfast, a staff member mutters, doesn’t start until 10am, even though the doors open at eight, the music is on, the coffee machine is on and the cakes are being unloaded. There are also at least 11 staff bumbling about. How about just a coffee then, I ask. A white americano, please? God, I’m needy. By this point, I’m reducing myself to a small speck of a woman the size of a postage stamp, and I’m upsetting nobody. A black americano arrives, and then someone takes pity and allows me to order porridge, which turns up half cooked with a ramekin of what they call bramble preserve (AKA blackberry jam). I ask brightly if I might meet the famous chef, mainly out of mischief, but he’s not here. I might go back when the place is in a better mood.

• Moods 98 Kirkgate, Leeds LS2, 0113-390 4552. Open all week, brunch 8am-4pm, bar small plates noon-9pm. Brunch from about £15 a head; bar small plates from about £8 each, all plus drinks and service