Nikos Taberna

Food ✪✪
Ambience ✪✪✪
Service ✪✪✪✪

61 Bridge Street
Morpeth
NE61 1PQ

01670 514 618

Website: Facebook only

Accessibility? No
Gluten free options? Yes

I really like reading menus. Not just in the “ooh, that sounds nice, shall we order it?” sense, but with, you know, a bit more seriousness and deliberation. They’re the sheet music of the restaurant biz, statements of intent, adverts for anticipated pleasure. I used to keep the ones we’d ordered from at fancy places, paper trophies as reminders of expensive but happily procured fun. I like looking at old menus too, reminders as they often are of trends you had forgotten about and dishes nobody makes like they used to.

There’s a particular grammar to the well written menu which tends, in my view, towards the terse, punchy end of the spectrum. Keep the adjectives to a minimum, I say. Under-promise and over-deliver. It’s nice to have an idea about what ingredients are going to arrive on the plate, and even a sense of the methodology that got them there. I don’t need to know how fabulous the kitchen thinks a dish is, nor the number of generations a recipe has come down to us from. So yeah, I like reading menus. Even the bad ones. I mean, you’ve got to flick through a few pages of Fifty Shades once in a while just to remind yourself why you enjoy Phillip Roth, right?

What I enjoy somewhat less is having to read an entire menu aloud, at the table, to the in-laws.

Newcastle Quayside Sunday Market

Food: at least ✪✪✪ 
Ambience: ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service: N/A 

Every Sunday

Quayside 
Newcastle upon Tyne 
NE1 3DE 

0191 211 5533 

If you are one of the 57,000 brave souls who will be running, jogging or perhaps just staggering from Newcastle to South Shields on the Great North Run tomorrow, then I salute you. I’d love to be there with you, bounding across the Tyne Bridge dressed as a hot dog, revelling in all that sweat and Lycra, but I’ve promised to take Mrs Diner back to Greece. 

Well, not Greece itself, but a little van that sells Greek gyros. It’s just below the bridge, in Newcastle’s Quayside market that appears every Sunday morning. This row of stalls and vehicles is one of the culinary delights of the City, turning a simple stroll beside the river into a brunch of champions. 

Great North Runners: I promise we’ll be thinking of you as we munch away below your jogging feet. We might even manage a wave or two. But don’t look down or you might just smell the food, give up running and come and join us.

Socrates @ No5

Food ✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪ 
 

5 Oldgate
Morpeth 
Northumberland 
NE61 1PY



01670 514666 
www.facebook.com/socratesno5  

Never go back, they say. They were right. 

Last year I reviewed one of the most unusual little restaurants in Northumberland, called Holystone Lodge. It was literally in the middle of nowhere, unless you happen to live in the village of Sharperton, in which case it was in the middle of everywhere. 

It was buzzing with happy locals and a wonderful lamb kleftiko. There was other good Greek food too: a tomato-rich, spicy kapama, and a baklava to die for, light, flaky, nutty and drooling with honey. It didn't call itself a Greek restaurant, and the non-Greek food didn’t really work for me, but it had a chef called Socrates, who was as Greek as the drachma. 

Then, sadly, the restaurant closed. I bemoaned its loss on this site. The North East had lost its only decent Greek restaurant, I said, even if it’s not actually Greek.  Not one reader demurred. However, I did predict that Socrates and his kleftiko would soon pop up somewhere else. Step forward Morpeth.