Food ✪✪✪ Ambience ✪✪✪
Service ✪✪✪✪
Milburn House
Dean Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 1LF
0191 261 7600
www.colonelporters.co.uk
Accessibility? Yes
Gluten free? Yes
I think it was Will Rogers, the American actor and wit, who observed: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. I agree: for me, my first impression of a restaurant affects the whole tone of the meal. If I walk into something that looks like the reception of a Marriott hotel, any poor chef is going to have an uphill battle to convince me I’m going to like anything I’m served.
I know I should be more tolerant, but we’re all programmed the way we are, right? It’s evolution’s fault, not mine. So let me admit to you one of my own, deep-seated bigotries: I’m really not keen on themed restaurants.
I know, I know: I should give them a chance. But just one look at a menu that features needlessly odd “ye olde” spellings, over-use of the word “curious”, or prolonged and irrelevant stories to justify the fit-out of the place, and my hackles start levitating.
In my defence, this intolerance does at least result from painful personal experience. Time and again I’ve found that the amount of effort a restaurant puts into its theming is in inverse proportion to the care it takes over its cooking. A recent visit to The Botanist in Newcastle bore this out (nice decor, shame about the lunch), as did a less-recent one to the ironically named Dr Feelgood in Sunderland (since closed, unmourned).
All of which preamble serves to underscore what a pleasant surprise was in store when I tried the food at Colonel Porter’s Emporium, a place so rammed with theme I half expected the desserts to arrive on a log-flume.
