08 Oct 2025
James Cameron is heading for a cheese coma after a visit to the deli wine bar…
To start with, do not go to The Bishop’s Cave if you are vegan. This is not the place for you. I didn’t even consider bringing my usual companion, the only thing she could have eaten was olives and given how much lovely beer is on offer things would have got messy.
That’s alright, though, not everything needs to be for everyone. Instead I found a suitably turophilic companion and we absolutely went to town on the cheese and meat selection.
It would be incorrect to refer to The Bishop’s Cave as a restaurant, per se. Nor strictly speaking is it a cave, and if it has any connection to a Bishop he is keeping it quiet. What it is, much like the Fleetville Larder from a few months ago, is a cheese-focussed deli that allows you to dine on their produce as well as take it away to get to know it better elsewhere.
Whereas the Larder is quite wholesome, where you could drop in for a bottle of pop and some posh crisps to take on a picnic, the Cave is an altogether more grown-up affair. Here you can buy cheese, meat and booze and little else. As if you would need anything else.
Let’s tackle the booze first. There are pages upon pages of the wine list, available by the bottle or the glass. This is appealingly stacked up along the wall, making you feel like you have snuck into the cellar of a chateau.
More pertinently to me they have five beers on tap, plus a fridge full of beer that you could take you pick from with a £1 ‘beerage’ charge. These are almost all from renowned Mancunian brewery Cloudwater, so you know you are getting top quality brews.
Drinks in hand we moved onto the dining. The centrepiece of this was the cheeseboard, starting at three cheeses but expanded by us up to five. Selecting these was very much like winning a trolley dash on Supermarket Sweep, so many great options to choose from and so many factors to take into consideration. There is ready guidance from a cheese expert but the real fun comes from trying to assemble a balanced and rewarding platter yourself.
To complement the cheese we also went for a charcuterie platter (no choice needed here, thankfully) and some pate and a bowl of olives (as a concession to vegetables). As there was only one cheese cutter on duty it took a while for our food to be assembled, despite the absence of any heating needed, but when it was laid out on our table it was truly breathtaking.
It was also quite hard to fit it all onto our smallish table, but then my tendency to over-order should be well known to regular readers by now.
There are few moments as pleasing to the soul as a cornucopia of tempting tit-bits presented in front of you, and knowing you will shortly have the privilege of consuming them. It felt a shame to ruin the layout initially, but we soon overcame our compunctions and started sampling the delights. For the cheese we went for a blue, a hard goats, a brie-like affair called Baron Bigod (because by God it’s good), a Gouda-style named ‘Old Winchester’ and an aromatic French number called Époisses de Bourgogne which is apparently so aromatic that it is banned from consumption on public transport in France due to its pungency.
The meats were also of a very high quality, with a variety of different spices and textures on display. It was fun combining each cheese with a different meat/cracker/chutney combination, although after trying this for a bit I felt I should be evaluating the cheeses in their pure form.
I declared each cheese in turn to be my favourite, but I think by the end I had returned to the Old Winchester as Top of the Fromages, due to its nutty flavour and crunchy veins of salt crystals.
They are also very generous with the crackers which means you are not having to overload your assemblages, as has been the case with some cheese-boards of my acquaintance.
The additions all worked well to complement the main event. The olives were in a sweet basil marinade which gave another track to the flavour derby, and the duck and Port paté was as rich as you would expect and were served with lovely crispy fruit toast that played up the sweetness of the port. Also thrown into the mix were some fat and juicy cornichons, because everything is better with pickles.
I find it hard to admire the French for anything, but I have to confess this very Francoian approach to eating, lingering over high quality and varied ingredients, paired with delightful drinks, is a very fine way to pass an evening and is very convivial to pleasant conversations.
We are entering the season where the Bishop’s Cave truly comes into its own, where people have abandoned the beer gardens and where finding a cozy snug hole where you can stock up your fat levels and drive away the chilly darkness is a godsend.
Although this is not a particularly cheap endeavour (our admittedly extravagant spread for two with accompanying beers came to over £100) I would argue it is worth the investment for two particular moments. The first is when the results of your careful cheese-picking is put down in front of you arranged in all its finery. The other is when you stumble back out into the night, with your body saturated in fats and alcohol and your spirit insulated by joy.
