Down on the waterfront at Granary Wharf is a gorgeous Italian restaurant tucked into an archway serving up its own Mediterranean twist on the classic English afternoon tea.
A staple in the city for nearly a decade now, foodies will be well au-fait with LIVIN'Italy - but for those who haven't yet made it down for a visit, their brilliant afternoon tea is as good an excuse as any.
Priced at £20 per person with prosecco (or £25 if you want to enjoy it with an Aperol spritz in hand), the new afternoon tea switches out the typical crustless cheese sandwiches and scones for Italian delicacies like miniature tiramisu and stuffed arancini balls.
Image: LIVIN'Italy
Comprised of a selection of classic Italian favourites and small plates, further treats on offer here include fried polenta with friarielli and frollino biscuits loaded with strawberry jam.
It seems from the reviews that you might get a little surprise when you visit, too, with one customer who visited in June saying they also enjoyed mini margarita pizzas, slow-cook short rib beef slider and roast potatoes with BBQ sauce as part of their afternoon tea experience.
The sweet selection on their visit, meanwhile, included portions of miniature tiramisu, strawberry jam Italian cake and indulgent, moist Italian chocolate cake with salted caramel and orange running throughout.
The glamorous restaurant and bar runs a host of delicious-looking menus alongside the afternoon tea, opening for breakfast and stretching through lunch and dinner into cocktail hour and beyond.
Whether you're after a spot of antipasto with wine or want to sample some proper Italian street food dishes, there's much more than just your typical pizza and pasta offering here (although they do that very well too).
Just like any good Italian, the focus here is on using quality ingredients and LIVIN'Italy works closer with Italian food producers and importers to cultivate the very best. As they say themselves, "without a great product you can’t create a great dish!"
To find out more about the Italian afternoon tea and make a reservation, head over to their website here.
The tiramisu hype lives on, and this time it's coming to Leeds.
It really does feel like the traditional Italian dessert has taken the world by storm as of late.
Everything from tiramisu cups and tiramisu coffees have been popping up all over our feed, and now tiramisu in drawer form is popping up in the city centre.
Misu Tiramisu is an independent business that began at Manchester's Christmas Markets and quickly became one of the most popular operators, all thanks to its miniature tiramisu ‘drawers’.
Images: The Hoot Leeds
The individually portioned and colourfully packaged desserts quickly became one of town’s top puddings, and owners Aleem and Aishah went on to launch a stand inside the Manchester Arndale too.
And now they’re branching out again in Leeds inside Trinity shopping centre for a two month residency.
You’ll find all their delicious flavours of handmade tiramisu, including classic, pistachio, chocolate, Biscoff, mango, and lemon - they'll also have some gluten-free tiramisu on offer as well, so no one has to miss out.
Images: The Hoot Leeds
Misu Tiramisu owners Aleem and Aishah spent a year refining the recipe for their tiramisus after a trip to Milan, first launching with their first market stall in Sale.
Misu Tiramisu is now open inside Trinity shopping centre opposite Boots Opticians and Pop Specs.
They're open every day of the week for you to get your tiramisu fix, from 9am to 8pm Monday to Saturday and from 11am to 5pm on a Sunday.
And trust us Leeds, they're just as delicious as they are adorable.
Fossilised 320-million-year-old fish found in Leeds’ Roundhay Park
Clementine Hall
A prehistoric fish fossil has been unearthed at Roundhay Park in Leeds.
The fascinating prehistoric skull bone of a coelacanth fish was discovered by a geologist at Roundhay Park earlier this year.
It is thought the creature was frozen in time aeons ago, during an era when the park was submerged under a vast tropical lagoon.
The remarkable discovery has now been kindly donated to Leeds Museums and Galleries and added to the natural sciences collection at Leeds Discovery Centre.
Image: Leeds City Council
The Leeds fossil was found by Ru Smith of the Yorkshire Geological Society during a reconnaissance walk he was carrying out ahead of a planned field excursion in the north Leeds park.
Describing the moment he made the discovery, Ru said: “There’s a layer of rock in the park which dates from around 320 million years ago, from a time before the breakup of the continents, when what is now the park would have been situated close the Equator and under the warm waters of a tropical lagoon. West Central Africa would be a good place to find similar environments in the present.
“There’s a bed of freshwater mussels called Carbonicola at one level in the rock, and opening a piece of shale from this bed in my hands I saw something unusual – a distinctive skull bone of a large fish. I knew straight away this was something different and very rare."
The bone was verified byexperts as belonging to a coelacanth older than those found elsewhere in Yorkshire, making it the oldest fossil coelacanth discovered in the region.
Ru added: “Coelacanths are pretty amazing fish and it’s just very cool to think that at one time, you could have been standing in Leeds and watching them swim around above a bed of mussels in Roundhay Park.
“That’s really the wonder of geology, looking at the rock and time travelling in the imagination to what was a very different world.”
Georgina Pellant -
10th September 2021 
