Dining Under Lockdown: Hjem Comforts Box

Food ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Value for money ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Pandemic friendly? (Ease of procurement, social distancing etc) ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Hjem
The Hadrian Hotel
Wall
Hexham
NE46 4EE

01434 681 232

restauranthjem.co.uk

Gluten free options? A number of items contain wheat, rye and barley- full allergen sheet provided in box.

Under the normal run of things I try to keep this site relatively comprehensive, taking in every notable restaurant opening across the North East, and even a few further afield. This inevitably means the occasional long, hopeful trek ending in bitter disappointment. If you want to experience real pathos and melancholy, try journeying the length of our wonderful region only to be rewarded by a microwaved, bought in sponge with the temerity to call itself a sticky toffee pudding. It happens. The struggle is real. 

Purnell's

Food ✪✪✪✪✪
Ambience ✪✪✪✪
Service ✪✪✪✪

55 Cornwall Street
Birmingham
B3 2DH

0121 212 9799

purnellsrestaurant.com

Accessibility? Yes, inform when booking

Gluten free? Yes, advise when booking

The Michelin Guide has an interesting place in the modern British culinary picture. It is on the one hand sniffed at and derided for being out of touch, or for making awards and deletions that are hard to understand. How can Sketch in London get a third star this year when the classical brilliance of (South Shields’ own!) John Williams at the Ritz sports but one? Whatever did Castle Terrace in Edinburgh do wrong to lose theirs a couple of years back? And, more locally, why was a restaurant cooking at the stratospheric levels of Hjem overlooked for a star last year?

1783 at The Burgoyne

Food ✪✪✪✪
Ambience ✪✪
Service ✪✪✪✪

On The Green
Reeth
Swaledale
DL11 6SN
01748 884 292

theburgoyne.co.uk 

Accessibility? No
Gluten free options? Yes 

I’ve endured some pretty duff meals in hotel restaurants over the last couple of years. The full spectrum, in fact: from stuffy country house piles serving terribly average food on big plates designed in vain to make you say “ooh, fancy!”, through to places struggling to maintain the standards across all their various and divergent offerings, all the way to gloriously inept experiences straight out of the Fawlty Towers playbook.

So, when The Burgoyne Hotel in Swaledale contacted me to ask me to consider a review I was minded to hit delete, until I clocked that the manager there is the former owner of Truffle, a restaurant in Darlington that I had very much enjoyed and was sad to hear had closed. So I kept hold of the email but, as Peter Cook might have said, immediately did nothing. I gave it a couple of months, booked in under a dastardly fake name, then hooned down the A1 to Reeth with Mrs Diner in tow, full of hope for a nice night in the country.

The Patricia (re-review)

Food ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪ 

139 Jesmond Road 
Jesmond 
Newcastle upon Tyne 
NE2 1JY 

0191 281 44 43 
www.the-patricia.com 

Accessibility? No 
Gluten free? Yes 

If there is any downside to the ongoing struggle to create an authoritative run-down of our region’s restaurant scene - and you can put your violins away, I’m not in the market for sympathy - it’s that I don’t go back to my favourites as often I’d like. 

Here’s the thing: people keep opening new restaurants, and I am possessed of but one gut. I simply don’t have the time to visit old favourites as much as I’d like to. Well, let this review act as a partial corrective. What it might lack in narrative peril - there was little doubt that we’d be any less than wonderfully well fed and watered - can perhaps be made up for in wide-eyed enthusiasm. You see, I really bloody love The Patricia.

Hjem

Food ✪✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

The Hadrian Hotel 
Wall 
Hexham 
Northumberland 
NE46 4EE 

01434 681 232 

www.restauranthjem.co.uk 
Accessibility? Not currently 
Gluten free? Yes, but call to discuss
Vegetarian - Yes, but please pre-order

Sometimes it takes a fresh pair of eyes to help you find something special in your own back yard. An outsider can get excited about things that might have grown mundane to a local; a stranger with genius and skill, can transform the banal, rendering it new and fresh again. Revelatory: that’s my opening salvo in trying to describe the experience at Hjem, a wonderful new restaurant in the village of Wall, just north of Hexham.

Jesmond Dene House

Food ✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪ 

Jesmond Dene House Hotel 
Jesmond Dene Road 
Newcastle upon Tyne 
NE2 2EY 

0191 212 3000 
www.jesmonddenehouse.co.uk 

Accessibility? Yes 
Gluten free? Yes 

So – this is a bit awkward. 

If only for reasons of civic pride, I’ve no interest in having a pop at any of our more venerable and venerated restaurants. On the other hand, the same rules apply to every review, be it a fresh new opening or an updated assessment of an old fave: one meal, unannounced, and I’ll pay my own bill. 

I’m quite certain that middling reviews were not what anyone envisaged when Jesmond Dene House moved to replace Michael Penaluna by installing Danny Parker as Executive Head Chef. Parker arrived last October from a head chef role at Kenny Atkinson’s House of Tides, in a move that caught the attention of the trade press, helped by positive showings on BBC’s Great British Menu. 

It looked from afar like a great move for everyone: Jesmond Dene got a young, hungry chef with knowledge of what is required to get the attention of the Michelin folk; Parker could step out from the shadow of Atkinson, taking over the reins of a more varied and wide-ranging food operation. It still might turn out that way (I really hope it does - I think he’s a very good chef). It just didn’t seem like it on the weeknight of our visit.

Roots York

Food ✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

68 Marygate 
York 
YO30 7BH 

No phone number 
www.rootsyork.com 

Accessibility? Yes 
Gluten free? Yes 

“It’s not you. You’re great. Honestly. No, no, you don’t need to change anything, I promise. Really, it’s not you: it’s me!” 

I always thought this was the sort of pathetic line that men - well, mostly men - trot out when they want to break up with someone, but don’t have testicular fortitude to tell the dumpee the truth. Far, far better to refer to some ambiguous failing of the self than shoulder the responsibility for someone else’s distress. That's always been my excuse anyhow. 

But once or twice of late, when faced with a particular type of modern British cookery, I’ve wondered whether my slightly muted response might not be the food’s fault, but my own. Is there something I’m just not getting? Why, when I’m going in fully primed to have my socks blown off am I coming out with them still firmly inside my shoes? 

The type of food and restaurant I’m talking about here is one which takes its time and place seriously, which thinks carefully about ingredients and preparations, often to the point of growing, making, or preserving them itself. In Northern England that means acknowledging the shortness of the growing season with creative thrift, perhaps alongside a focus on high quality dairy and meats, and certainly an interest in preserving and fermenting. Lake Road Kitchen in Windermere does this sort of thing. I couldn’t wait to eat there, expecting a minor epiphany, but found it... just nice. And so then to Roots in York, the second restaurant from Tommy Banks, which was, well... just very nice.

The Roxburgh

 
Food ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪ 

4 Roxburgh House 
Park Avenue 
Whitley Bay 
Tyne & Wear
NE26 1DQ 

0191 253 1661 
facebook.com/theroxburghonparkave 

What’s happened to Whitley Bay? It’s fast turning into a food and drink paradise: Hinnies, Nord, Papa Ganoush, Left Luggage Room, Elder and Wolf, Storm Cellar, Omni, the new Spanish City – where have I missed? Every time I visit the town, or a Metro stop either side of it, there seems to be somewhere new and good. 

I’m sure locals would give a shrug of their collective shoulder at this; they know just fine what they’ve got, thanks. But for anyone not from the area, with hazy recollections of Whitley Bay’s grim, stag-frenzied past, this new state of affairs is nothing short of miraculous. 

As far as I know, the upward trend all began with this little place: The Roxburgh. I had a great brunch here when it first opened at the beginning of 2015. My review began with the understatement: “It’s not exactly our region’s culinary capital”. I couldn’t really understand why a chef of Gary Dall’s skills and pedigree had chosen to open his first restaurant here. This chef from Wallsend had worked under Laybourne, and in Sydney, and used to be the private chef of touring rock bands. Why a tiny dining room in Whitley Bay?

Restaurant DH1 [CLOSED]

Food ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

The Avenue 
Durham 
DH1 4DX 

0191 384 6655 
www.restaurantdh1.co.uk 

Accessibility? Yes 
Gluten free? Yes (call in advance) 

[DH1 announced in March 2018 that it was closing its doors "with much sadness and a heavy heart".]

It’s a fickle and scary business, this restaurant trade, especially when you’re attempting to run your own gaff. Crazy-long hours, deliveries not turning up on time, unappreciative customers, tax returns and all manner of other hells. Oh, and worst of all: food critics. You’d have to be a bit mad, wouldn’t you? 

But still they come, the brave and the foolhardy, to put themselves through this heart-wrenching mangle of an industry. For those of us who think sitting in a nice room being fed lovely things is about as good as life gets, thank goodness they do. 

So, when an email plopped into my inbox from Stephen and Helen Hardy, proprietors of Durham’s Restaurant DH1, proclaiming that business had been tough of late and that to drum up extra trade they were launching a new, moderately priced midweek menu (£30 for three courses), I thought it no more or less than an act of straightforward citizenry to try it out.

The Duck House

Food ✪✪✪✪ (but see comment below)
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

2-3 Town Hall Buildings 
Princes Street 
Corbridge 
Northumberland
NE45 5AD 

01434 634 368 
www.duckhousecorbridge.co.uk 

[Warning:  change of chef - rating requires revision.]

How long does it take a dish to travel from the best restaurant in the world to Corbridge? Thanks to my recent meal at the Duck House, I can tell you precisely: 14 years.

The Patricia

Food ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

139 Jesmond Road 
Newcastle upon Tyne 
NE2 1JY 

0191 281 4443 
www.the-patricia.com 

Accessibility? Yes 
Gluten free? Yes – but pre-book 

At the beginning of these reviews, I usually try to only hint at the verdict, keeping full disclosure to the end. It probably comes from some vain idea that if I’m going to spend time writing it down, I’d quite like you to actually read all the way through. It’s what TV people call “jeopardy”. But then there are times when the restaurant in question is either so wildly good or honkingly bad that there’s just no point in beating about the bush. This is one such occasion. 

The Patricia, Jesmond’s latest addition, recently served me the most flat-out enjoyable meals I’ve eaten for... well, for ages. It was brilliant. I loved it. We had a great time. If that’s all you needed to know, fine, you’re done. If you want to know why, you’re welcome to spend the next 800 words in my company while I shout about it.

The Raby Hunt

Food ✪✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Summerhouse 
Nr Darlington 
Co Durham 
DL2 3UD 

01325 374 237 
www.rabyhuntrestaurant.co.uk 

Accessibility? Yes 
Gluten free? Yes, but call in advance 

[WINNER: North East Restaurant of the Year 2012/2013/2016]

The paradox of perfection is what makes high-end restaurant cooking such a unique challenge. Every day a chef has to turn up for work and plate up hundreds of dishes, aiming for flawlessness each time, yet knowing deep down that there is really no such thing. The chef is, in a sense, doomed to failure before he even ties his apron: yet it’s only in the trying, over and over again, for that mirage-like moment in which you know that a dish couldn’t be improved by a single grain of salt, that you can really succeed at the very highest level. 

I had cause to reflect on all this as we left The Raby Hunt after a spectacular lunch, trying to figure out why this meal, which I’m happily and easily awarding 6 stars, was better than previous visits I had also pegged at that level (which is the maximum number of stars that will fit comfortably on my Secret Diner window sticker). Ultimately I concluded that chef James Close’s secret is the gentle evolution of dishes, the search for better raw materials and the slow but steady refining of techniques. It makes sitting down in his plush dining room a joy. 

Manchester House

Food ✪✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪ 

18-22 Bridge Street 
Spinningfields 
Manchester 
M3 3BZ 

0161 835 2557
www.manchesterhouse.uk.com

I was determined to write this review of Manchester House without mentioning the “M” word. However, they said it first. 

“Yeah, this place is a one-off; Tim Bacon opened it up specifically to try and get the star,” said our waiter, just as we were settling down at our vast four top. 

Tim, the owner of this and several other leading Manchester restaurants, died of cancer just a few weeks before my visit. The star which he craved is, of course, the one that a certain French tyre company hands out to restaurants serving food considered to represent “very good cooking in its category”. 

The contrast between those six prosaically unimpressive words, and the drastic effect they can have on the lives of chefs and restaurateurs is stark. The Michelin star is, to some, the ultimate goal. 

Since Manchester House opened in 2013, two editions of the little red book have been published, and neither included that all-important symbol alongside the description of Manchester House. So what? Well, so more fool the Michelin Guide’s inspectors, at least on the evidence of our lunch.

The Man Behind The Curtain

Food ✪✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 

68-78 Vicar Lane 
Top floor Flannels 
Leeds 
LS1 7JH 

0113 243 2376 
www.themanbehindthecurtain.co.uk 

“You’ve got to review The Man Behind The Curtain,” Kenny Atkinson wrote to me. 

Who am I to disagree with the man who’s just won Newcastle’s only Michelin star? He didn’t have it then, of course – this was months ago. The buzz amongst chefs about Michael O’Hare’s extraordinary, mad, flamboyant, exquisite cooking, just on our doorstep in Leeds, has been going round chefs’ circles ever since his restaurant opened last year.

Jesmond Dene House Hotel

Food ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Jesmond Dene Road 

Newcastle upon Tyne 

NE2 2EY 

0191 212 3000 

www.jesmonddenehouse.co.uk 

[August 2018: The bad news - executive head chef Michael Penaluna has left JDH and is now to be found at Wynyard Hall. The good news - he has been replaced by Danny Parker, formerly head chef at Kenny Atkinson's Michelin-starred House of Tides, star of TV and radio and one of the most exciting talents in the region. Danny's new menu, team and ambition can be tested from October. In the meantime, I've revised the food rating to ✪✪✪✪✪]

Two weeks ago I stabbed a razor-sharp steak knife into Newcastle’s Miller & Carter restaurant, comparing their béarnaise sauce to Dulux emulsion paint, and castigating the baby food mush that came with their overcooked scallops, the tasteless risotto and wet, iron-tasting steak. Readers were quick to approve. 

“Ouch!” they went, followed quickly by “Reckon you saved us a few bob”. 

Quite a few bob, in fact, as a Twitter follower of mine called Sprocket Man pointed out: “Not cheap for what it was. Plenty of local places are better for the same money.” 

He’s right. £40 for a terrible meal is a ripoff. £40 for a brilliant dinner in a local restaurant could be worth saving up for. It can buy you an excellent meal in some of our very best eateries, including almost anything from the à la carte menu at Peace & Loaf. I'm grateful to him for inspiring this week's review - my task: find a meal in Newcastle that's infinitely better than Miller & Carter for the same price.

I chose Jesmond Dene House because I’d already re-reviewed Peace & Loaf earlier this year, and I haven't written about Jesmond Dene since 2013, when I gave its tasting menu 6 stars. To be honest, I feared it had gone off the boil and I didn’t want new readers of www.secretdiner.org being misled by an inflated rating.

Peace & Loaf

Food ✪✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 

217 Jesmond Road 
Newcastle upon Tyne 
NE2 1LA 

0191 281 5222 
www.peaceandloaf.co.uk 

It’s all change for Newcastle’s fine dining scene. Recently I reported that Kenny Atkinson’s House of Tides has abandoned his tasting-menu-only policy, and introduced a Market Menu option for lunch and dinner. Now I can reveal that two Newcastle restaurants are adding tasting menus to their offerings. 

In March Artisan introduces a seven-course “nose to tail” menu for just £37.50 per person while, later this month, former Masterchef runner-up Dave Coulson adds a tasting menu for his loyal and enthusiastic clientele at Jesmond’s Peace & Loaf. So loyal are Coulson’s customers, that their votes gave it my Journal Readers’ award in 2014. 

It deserves its success. When I first visited, shortly after its opening in November 2013, I gave it five stars, complimenting its modern, complex cooking, ambition and charm. Not resting on laurels, Dave Coulson tweeted that he wasn’t ungrateful, but he hoped that in due course he’d earn a sixth. 

House of Tides

Food ✪✪✪✪✪✪ 

Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 

28-30 The Close 

Quayside 

Newcastle upon Tyne 

NE1 3RF 

0191 230 3720 

www.houseoftides.co.uk 

Accessibility: No lift – ground floor bar area only 

This is an important week for House of Tides. The “casual fine dining” establishment, which opened on Newcastle’s Quayside exactly one year ago, is marking its anniversary with a pretty radical change of direction. 

Despite warmly welcoming its arrival, along with everyone else who cares about good food in our City, I was fairly hard on the place in my last review. There was no doubt that Kenny Atkinsons’s cooking is exemplary, but I was worried about how viable the place would be with just a tasting menu. Could he encourage loyalty from local foodies with one menu entitled Winter? – last February seemed an awful long way from Spring. 

I also questioned the depth of talent in the kitchen – when Kenny cooked, everything was gorgeous, but how would the brigade cope in his absence? The third, and most obvious problem, was the breathtakingly inept service. With a cloying maître d’ and poorly trained staff, front of house really let the side down. 

But that’s all water under the Tyne Bridge. At Kenny Atkinson’s invitation, I returned to celebrate the restaurant’s birthday and I’m delighted to report that House of Tides enters its second year in excellent shape.

Hedone

Food ✪✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 



301-303 Chiswick High Road 
London 
W4 4HH 

020 8747 0377 
www.hedonerestaurant.com 

Chiswick is a mixture of sturdy Edwardian houses with traffic jams and noisy overflying planes.  It’s the first bit of London you hit after the M4 from Heathrow. 

Cut in two by the relentless A4, quite why properties are so expensive in this polluted congestion zone is beyond me. But it has one redeeming feature: Hedone, which can almost be translated from the Greek as “wanton pleasure” – aptly.

Adam Reid at The French

Food ✪✪✪✪✪✪ 

Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 

The Midland 

Peter St 

Manchester 

M2 3NQ 

0161 235 4780

www.the-french.co.uk

Accessibility: Yes
Gluten-free: Yes

In the unlikely event that I ever gain an entry in Who’s Who, I’m pretty certain that my list of recreations would include long lunches and sleeping. In my case, there’s a direct correlation between the two. My lunch heaven demands a couple of spare hours and more than a couple of glasses of good wine, after which I am invariably rewarded with the sleep of the dead.

The Orangery, Rockliffe Hall

Food ✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 

Rockliffe Hall Hotel 
Hurworth Place 
Hurworth-on-Tees 
Darlington 
DL2 2DU 

01325 729999 
www.rockliffehall.com 

It’s three years since I last visited Rockliffe Hall. Back then, it was to try Kenny Atkinson’s food. Sadly, he was off that night (although the restaurant pretended otherwise), and it showed. As a result, the cooking only deserved 3 stars from me and Kenny was cross. 

I hope he has forgiven me, now that I’ve given his excellent new House of Tides 5 glowing stars. It should be on course for a Michelin gong, once it’s sorted out its front of house. But what of the place he left behind? 

Rockliffe Hall is an important venue for the North East, a place to take clients or the inlaws. But a 5-star hotel with a 3-star restaurant? Surely that’s wrong – it was time to set the record straight.