About

Squidbeak is all about finding the best places to eat in Yorkshire. We write as we find and report honestly. We celebrate the best and if a place doesn’t come up to scratch, it doesn’t get in. We visit anonymously and pay for all the meals we review.

Who are Squidbeak?

We are Jill Turton, Mandy Wragg and Helen Scott. Squidbeak is the fruit of our never-ending journey around Yorkshire, keeping tabs on restaurants, wine bars, cafes and tea rooms with a promise to be independent and honest about the Yorkshire food and drink landscape.

Jill and Mandy share in writing the Yorkshire Post’s weekly restaurant review column as well as leading a secret life as restaurant inspectors for national food guides. We’ve written for Sawday, Routiers, the AA and Egon Ronay and various websites including the North York Moors National Park’s Taste of the North York Moors, but there are some we can’t tell you about because we have to inspect anonymously. As well as her knowledge of food, Helen is our wine expert. She writes intelligently about wine without being at all pretentious. Trust us, between us we’ve eaten and shared a bottle in every halfway decent restaurant in Yorkshire.

How did we get here?

In the mid 90s we turned pleasure into business. Jill wrote a guide to the best food in Yorkshire and has written for the Times, Guardian, Square Meal, Olive and Restaurant. She has contributed to numerous Time Out travel guides and wrote the Time Out Guide to the Lake District. She is a member of the Guild of Food Writers.Well, we’re friends who met at Yorkshire Television. We worked as researchers and producers on documentaries and while we were doing all the worthy stuff on location, we were also checking out worthy stuff for our stomachs: deli’s, specialist producers, farmers’ markets and usually finding somewhere good to eat or drink, a Guangdong market for sharks’ lips, the best bargain curry house in Bradford or somewhere with Michelin stars in Paris.

Mandy is an inspector for Alastair Sawday Guides and knows all the best pubs, inns and boutique hotels in the north of England. She’s covered cafes and restaurants for the Sunday Times, The Guardian and Cool Places and interviewed chefs for the publican’s trade paper the Morning Advertiser.

Helen is a journalist and media consultant, but has always had a passion for travel, food and wine. Winning the chance to be wine writer Chrstine Austin’s apprentice at the prestigious International Wine Challenge inspired her to get some qualifications, and she has now passed the first two levels of exams at the Wine and Spirit Education Trust.

The north is ‘our patch’

Mandy was born in Derbyshire, lived in Sheffield, worked in Leeds and lives in the Pennines. Jill was born in Lancashire, schooled in Yorkshire and now lives in York. Helen lives in Leeds. At weekends we usually head for our boltholes on the Yorkshire coast. So, one way and another, we’ve got the region covered.