El Gato Negro....

Popped over the Pennines today to see some friends in Sowerby Bridge in Yorkshire. First trip out anywhere this year. The M60/M62 was a bit of a nightmare. They are turning it into a 'smart' motorway. I'm not sure what this means. Either it's all going to be made more intelligent or they are going to paint it a nice colour. It's going to take until Summer 2017. Today, on a quiet Saturday, the traffic was just getting to 50mph, it must be crawling in the rush hours.

On the way home I stopped to take a picture of this restaurant in Ripponden. It's a much lauded Spanish Tapas restaurant called El Gato Negro (The Black Cat). Sadly it closed down just before Christmas. The reason is that it is upping sticks and moving to central Manchester. It will open just off King Street in early 2015. It's a very successful restaurant. It hasn't got a Michelin star but it has got a Michelin Bib Gourmand, an award that might be given to a restaurant before a Michelin star proper.

It's fame has attracted the Manchester foodies by the hundreds so they have decided to move the business into the city centre. Manchester's gain is Ripponden's loss. We complain about London getting all the attention and development, but Manchester does much the same but maybe not on the same scale. Ripponden must be annoyed to have lost such a business to its larger neighbour, especially as it's crossed the border from Yorkshire into what used to be Lancashire.

El Gato Negro wasn't the only building in Ripponden to be decorated with a yellow bicycle, a reminder that the Tour de France passed this way last summer. A French race passed a Spanish restaurant in Yorkshire...