Itchy City guide to Leeds. Food, drink, film, music, stage, events, shopping, offers and competitions within Leeds, Great Britain.

Itchy's always wanted to write a restaurant review. We'd envisaged a world where we could use words like palate and sniff wine like a pro. With all that in mind, we arrived terribly overdressed at Ciao Bella: a wonderfully-situated Italian ristorante (their words just sound so much better, don't they?), nestled on cobble-clad Dock Street.

On arrival we could only presume that Ciao Bella was so quiet because it was run by a goon, called Mildred, who enjoys nothing more than licking your steak before serving it, raw. How wrong we were.

After assessing our options we plumped for the £10.95 set menu. To start we decided to go all posh and have liver pâté with toast. We'll be honest: we were a tad dubious when it arrived having looked like it had been dropped from a Pterodactyl's bottom but we plucked up the courage to taste it...and my are we glad we did. It was wonderfully creamy and full of flavour. We simply couldn't get enough, and shed a tear when we ran out of toast. It's a shame they didn't provide more.

After subjecting the waiter to many Antony Hopkins impressions, we moved on to a fancy pasta in a tomato and basil sauce. It oozed monotony – the sort of food that you douse in salt and pepper when it arrives - so, because Itchy clearly knows better than any chef, we decided to jazz it up a bit (Foojazzle?).

Determined to push the boundaries of taste for you darling lot, we proclaimed that it must have meat. ”Do you have Chorizo, my good sir?“ Indeed he did, and from that he'd picked up that we like spicy food.

We're supposed to tell you how tasted like now, but we can't. After one mouthful the assorted foreign delights we'd demanded cataclysmically exploded in Itchy's face, rendering us a gasping, blubbering figure of mockery. We can tell you that the texture was lovely, and the Chorizo sublime. Just don't do what we did: we hear that the originalis much nicer and less lethal.

After dousing our tongue of fire with beer, we tucked into dessert: warm chocolate cake with gooey melted chocolate and ice cream. With each mouthful we felt ourselves slipping slowly into a cocoa-induced coma: heavenly is not the word. And the best bit? The bill. £10.95 (excluding the many cooling beers). What a bargain.

Joe Garnett

You'll be needing some hotels in Leeds.