Hillgate Quays, Gateshead NE8 2BH (0191 737 1120). Small plates £3-£8.50, mains £11-£8.50, feasting £40-£70, wines from £15
About an hour into our dinner at Träkol, one of my companions sits back. He surveys the outrageous platters on the table and says: “I think this may be my new favourite restaurant in the whole country.” It’s a big bold statement, but it’s one I can get behind. Träkol, located in a nest of renovated shipping containers tucked under the Tyne Bridge on the Gateshead side, is not some colonically irrigated, Botoxed and depilated gastro palace. It’s not going to wrench you through the torture garden of faine daining. It’s something so very much better than that: a ragingly modern restaurant determined to feed you with the seriously good stuff, until you slump back and say, enough already.
Google Translate tells me that träkol is the Swedish for charcoal; if it’s wrong, go argue with the algorithm. Certainly, it makes sense. The kitchen, located behind a glass wall to keep from smoke-curing its diners, is dominated by a huge charcoal grill. So yes, another live fire restaurant, but one with serious intent. It is the food end of a smart operation collectively called the By the River Brew Company, run by Dave Stone and Rob Cameron of Wylam, a 30-barrel microbrewery in Newcastle’s Exhibition Park. There’s also a cycle repair unit out back and at weekends, a market down the banks of the Tyne for street food operators. Shortly, more converted containers will come into use for restaurant pop-ups.
Both the website and the menu vibrate with buzz words: not just “live fire” but “fiercely seasonal” and “nose to tail”. Meat is dry-aged in a room lined with salt that comes from the Himalayas. Well, obviously. For once it all amounts to something. Take a dish like the grilled pork jowl with XO slaw from the small plates list. At first it looks like the pungent coleslaw, rendered a shade of amber from its Asian dressing, has been laid on toast, until you cut in. Now you clock that the burnished slabs underneath are pieces of crisped, salty pig cheek that have been slow-cooked then seared. It’s one of those dishes that you think about when you wake up the next day.
From the same list, tomatoes are salt-baked to intensify their flavour, cooled then layered with slices of pink lamb heart. Those turn up on toast, sodden with sweet tomato juices and salted anchovy. There are thumbnail-sized surf clams, opened over fire before being pelted with fermented black beans and red chilli. You suck the sweet, salty clam meat off the shell and then keep probing with your tongue for all the other good stuff tucked away in there. Happily, they can also do delicate, allowing Lindisfarne oysters to sing under a bright Nam Jim dressing of lime, fish sauce and chilli. Or you can have them baked under Montgomery’s cheddar. It’s a tricky thing to pull off. Montgomery’s is a bruiser of a cheese. It could easily overwhelm the oyster, especially if you let it spend too long under the grill. They don’t. The sea and the dairy hold hands.
But the real fun lies under the heading “Feasting”. Take Middle White Pig. You get two platters. On the first is a 1kg chop, charred outside, slightly pink within, with thick discs of black pudding, its exterior crisped. There are caramelised apples, a watercress salad and grilled potatoes. The other platter brings half a pig’s head. (If you don’t like to be reminded that meat comes from animals with ears and noses, move on to the next paragraph.) The skin is crackled to within an inch of its life; oh how I love the sound a pig ear makes when it snaps. The meat underneath is soft and sweet. And the price for all this? £40. Allegedly it’s for two and I’m sure the management don’t want me to argue, because they need the orders. But I’d be quite afraid of the two people who could finish this by themselves. Bring a friend.
Let them hang around for the whole grilled turbot. It takes serious skill and nerve to grill a beautiful fish like this and get it right. The skin is grilled to that curious place between gelatinous and crisp. The pearly fillet underneath slides off the bone with a nudge. It is fish cookery of the first order – and a lot of it for £55, which is £10 less than at Brat in London. It comes with new potatoes, and peas braised with bacon. (They will do you a single serving of turbot for £20.)
There are six of us booked in to eat tonight: most of the panellists and producers of Radio 4’s Kitchen Cabinet. We are probably the crew of terrible people you most don’t want to see turn up in your lovely restaurant without due warning. If so, they do not flinch. Tables are pushed together to make room. Advice is given for those who want it on the long list of beers, with names like Weizen My Ass, Tangerine Tart and Broken Dream. Almost all of them are offered in small and large measures. There’s also an encouraging wine list including a 2017 Albariño from Rías Baixas for an extremely good value £26. In London it’s usually £40+.
Because there are six of us, and the two feasting dishes are meant for four, we also get a cauliflower steak seared on the grill and enthusiastically seasoned with shawarma spices, plus a thick cut Barnsley chop with cockles, seaweed butter and samphire. This is called over-ordering, but how were we to know? There are desserts, but there isn’t even a discussion around our table. We are done. For the record, the desserts on offer are a plate of wood-fired figs with caramelised brioche, or a sundae of salted caramel, chocolate and peanuts.
If you make it to those, I’ll be impressed. The nearest thing to a quibble is over their Reuben sandwich fritters, which are tasty enough, but don’t hit us with the flavours of sauerkraut, Russian dressing or Swiss cheese. Look. I’m working hard to find a niggle. But by now you should have got the message: Träkol is a place you want to eat in. Just go with enough people to do it justice.
News bites
I’ve already referenced Brat in east London, on account of their way with turbot, but Tomos Parry’s live fire cooking goes far beyond that star dish, to take in the likes of Herdwick mutton, whole mallard and serious pieces of beef. Do not miss his chopped egg salad with the salty hit of bottarga, or his game sausage with blood pudding and beans, a rustic dish in high heels (bratrestaurant.com).
The soup company Yorkshire Provender has launched a product designed to raise money for the homelessness charity Centrepoint, based on a competition winning entry by home cook Omero Gallucci. 20p from each pot of the red pepper and chorizo soup, available in Waitrose, will go to the charity as part of their ‘Big Broth’ fundraising campaign.
Crowdfunder of the week: brothers Liam and Ellis Barrie, of the Marram Grass restaurant in Anglesey, north Wales are looking to raise £30,000 to open a cookery school, providing lessons not just for paying guests but also local school children. Search ‘Liam Barrie’ at kickstarter.com
Wasted Calories and Ruined Nights: a Journey Deeper into Dining Hell by Jay Rayner is published by Guardian Faber at £5. Order a copy for £4.30 at guardianbookshop.com
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
