Branches (Jesmond)

Food ✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪ 

9 Osborne Road 
Jesmond 
Newcastle upon Tyne 
NE2 2AE 

0191 239 9924
Accessibility? Yes 
Gluten free? Yes 
www.branchesponteland.co.uk/jesmond

Normally food takes precedence over interior design in my reviews, and rightly so. Fixtures and fittings are lucky to get half a sentence towards the fag end of the page. I’m simply more interested - and good deal more qualified – to assess what’s on the plate. If the food's amazing, I’ll happily eat it standing up, or outside, or wherever. 

But sometimes not to discuss the do-out of the dining room is to ignore the elephant in the room. Especially when that elephant is a honking great fake tree. This is the second outpost of Branches; the first one, in Ponteland, also features a big lump of pretend woody perennial in similarly perpetual blossom. Now they have a second branch, and a second tree. They’ve got a theme and they’re sticking to it. There can be no Branches without trees, I suppose.

Branches

Food ✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪ 

3 Brewery Lane 
Ponteland 
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE20 9NZ 

01661 822 951 
www.branchesrestaurant.co.uk 

Why did restaurant diners suddenly become so obsessed with photographing their own meals? 

When I started these reviews, back in the dark ages when my smartphone’s picture quality was even worse than some of the food I was writing about (hence my readers’ frequent complaints about the grainy images), I always felt very self-conscious when taking a picture. Not wanting to blow my cover, I would wait until a waiter’s back was turned, before furtively snatching a memory of a dish or a menu card. Now everybody in the room is at it, so I can just relax and snap away without raising suspicion. 

Restaurant pics are crowding out the cute cats on Facebook. It’s the latest subset of that modern phenomenon whereby no moment of our lives can pass without being committed to digital history and shared: “I was here, and this happened – please Like me.” 

Were you indeed? Well done. How impressive. 

There’s something else at play here.  Food is essential and enjoyable, but also ephemeral. It stimulates all the senses (and sometimes more), but before we destroy it by eating it, we hope our phones can capture the moment. Sadly, all that comes through the lens is the plating: the taste must be imagined later. Maybe they'll bring out a new version of Android or iOS with taste and smell buttons. That would be an innovation worth the upgrade. 

I had good cause to think about this as we were seated in the not-so-shabby chic dining room of Branches in Ponteland, because on the next table the chef’s food was being photographed within an inch of its life. Works of art were emerging from the kitchen and being placed under a lighting rig while a chap with a massive DSLR honed in on his prey.