Ambience ✪✪✪✪
Service ✪✪✪
8 Neville Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 5EN
0191 349 9187
www.centralnewcastle.co.uk
Accessibility? Yes
Gluten free? Pre-booked only
The development of the area bang opposite Newcastle’s Central Station has raised many an eyebrow and furrowed no shortage of brows over the last couple of years. August figures of no lesser standing than Dame Vera Baird and the Reverend Nicholas Buxton voiced concerns that the planned opening of a “Gentlemen’s” club (were air-quotes ever more justified?) would give visitors to the city, fresh off the train, the wrong idea about our fair city.
As it happens, their fears have gone unrealised. The entrance to the basement dwelling called For Your Eyes Only is, to use a word that I imagine was extensively deployed in planning applications, discreet. Making a far louder noise about itself, and of rather more interest to this column, is what is on the ground level: a shiny new Neopolitan-style pizza and cocktail joint called Central Oven and Shaker.
Unless Aperol spritz and soupy pizzas are going to give people the wrong idea about Newcastle - and if so, I’m not sure what constitutes the right idea - then the City’s image is intact.
