Food ✪✪✪✪ Ambience ✪✪✪✪
Service ✪✪✪✪✪
Arch 6 Westgate Road
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 1SA
0191 222 0156
www.frenchquarternewcastle.co.uk
Accessibility? Yes
Gluten free? Yes
Despite the fact that almost every decent chef in the world cut his or her teeth on basic French cooking techniques, and despite the huge numbers of Brits every year who jet off to holidays in the Dordogne or the South of France, I’ve always thought it a bit odd that Britain has so few real French restaurants.
Plenty of high-end gaffs are sort-of French of course, what with their extensive wine lists, long-reduced sauces and occasionally terrifying service, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m talking platters of meats and cheese reeking of farmyards, with bread and good wine. I’m thinking of simple, satisfying dishes such as pot-au-feu, choucroute and properly made coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon. I’m talking real French food, like you get all over France. And which I love.
Is it some kind of oh-so-British reverse snobbery, or is it a lack of good ingredients, or sufficient skill and time in the kitchen? I guess it’s a lot less hassle to open up some half-arsed “Italian” or “Asian” place, slinging duff pizzas, gloopy sauces and similar crimes against decency. Or maybe it’s the recent but pervasive suspicion that French food isn’t what it was, that these classic dishes have kept it mired in ossified tradition (a view which, on the whole, prompts me to exclaim “C’est des conneries!”).
Whatever. Suffice to say I was more than excited to learn that Hexham’s reliably good Bouchon Bistrot is no longer the region’s only thoroughly francophile restaurant. The fabulously named Cedric Boc-Ho and his partner Catherine Metcalfe have opened up The French Quarter in the railway arch that used to house the awful Sausage Emporium.
