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The interior of a cheap steak house... |
Service ✪✪✪
Ambience ✪✪
21 Queen Street
NE1 3UG 0191 221 0904
www.panhaggerty.com
[ALERT: Feb 17th 2014 - Pan Haggerty has gone into administration and closed]
21 Queen Street is the site of the best restaurant Newcastle has ever hosted, Terry Laybourne’s eponymous Michelin-starred eating house.
This former temple of haute cuisine has been occupied for the last few years by Pan Haggerty, a restaurant I’ve avoided in the past because of the large logos stuck on the window, which suggest it might be part of a chain of cheap steak houses. Recently I heard that the food was rather good, so I tentatively opened the door to discover – the interior of a cheap steak house.
You know the restaurants you find in airport hotels when you’ve been stranded by fog: brown and orange décor, with small over-laquered tables, leather seating and lounge music? That’s it exactly, a room without personality or charm.
This is at odds with the name, of course, which suggests rustic home fare.
A “pan haggerty” is a cheese and potato bake, traditionally the poor Northumbrian’s winter dish. The restaurant serves it as a starter, topped with duck egg, and dressed, as it should be, with brown sauce. But elsewhere on the extensive menu, far from being rustic, it has a mix of styles – and I use the word “mix” advisedly, because “blend” would suggest some sort of cohesion. Here some of the dishes read like a buffet at a wedding.
So my starter had “star anise and vanilla sautéed king prawns, seared scallop and carpaccio of tuna with green gazpacho and pickled cucumber”: three courses of a tasting menu in one go.
“Prawns” was a single prawn, sat next to a perfectly seared scallop and a tiny slice of tuna of excellent freshness and quality. Asia and Africa in a solitary shrimp: aniseed and the surprising aftertaste of vanilla would have been welcome at the start of any fine dining evening. But why throw three disconnected dishes onto the same plate?
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Too fussy: the chef should calm down and simplify |
Our other starter was a fine salmon, cured with beetroot and vodka and thickly sliced on a nice beetroot puree. But it too had an intruder: another king prawn, sitting inside a beignet with toothless horseradish.
The fussiness continued with the mains. Though the cooking was consistently good – tender loin of beef and succulent ox tongue – here too was an interloper, a little lobster tortellini. Turf and a tiny surf. Our most successful plate was rabbit wrapped in bacon with merguez sausage. With aubergine puree, an intense little tomato, and a really good ginger and apple jelly, this chef has talent and is obviously trying very hard, but he should calm down and simplify.
Main courses were around £18 and starters around £7.
I thoroughly recommend the chocolate cherry tart with its cherry marshmallow.
I thoroughly recommend the chocolate cherry tart with its cherry marshmallow.
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