217 Jesmond Road, Newcastle (01912 815 222). Meal for two, including drinks and service, £110
Let’s start at the very end, with a petit four of bubblegum-flavoured marshmallow dyed the shade of blue that meat inspectors use to mark carcasses as unfit for human consumption. There are reasons why there are very few genuinely blue foods. It’s the colour of decay. More to the point it’s the colour of mould. But it’s also the colour of bubblegum, a marker that it’s a food for kids, because adults would run away.
And this is the parting shot at Peace and Loaf, located on a humble shopping parade in Newcastle’s Jesmond. It is, like so much of the meal that preceded it, a deft piece of work. The bubblegum flavour is there, that comic sweetness experienced around the edges of your tongue, but it doesn’t numb your mouth. It is a sudden whiff of childhood, at the end of the very adult experience of a restaurant meal.
I was a little nervous about this place, because of the punnery of the name: Peace and Loaf. Geddit? It’s like peace and love, only… Oh, never mind. Whimsy like this is hard to pull off. You can’t just go for the gags. It has to be underpinned by technique and skill. At first glance chef Dave Coulson, a former MasterChef: The Professionals finalist, does not look like a man built for comedy. He’s a big tattooed bloke with the sort of beard you could mislay your wallet and watch in, or perhaps even small children. He’s dark-browed and serious, as are most of the brigade we glimpse through the opening into the kitchen. They look like manly men, doing manly man work, with squeezy bottles and piping bags.
And yet, give or take an occasional heavy hand with the salt, there is a lightness of touch here, not so much in the flavours, which are big and serious, but in the ideas. They’re like a bunch of dockers in steel toe-capped boots dancing a skilful ballet. The service in the high-vaulted two-level dining room is laid back. They know when to get out of the way. The room looks like the lightly upmarket Italian it once was: think Ikea showroom by way of Athena poster. They do like their dangly lights and painted brickwork.
But you can see from both dish descriptions and platings that this lot mean business. They think cooking well matters. Then, among the nibbles, come cheesy beans on toast, a sliver of melba toast with a blitzed purée of beans and tomatoes, and the finest grating of melting cheese. One crunch and there’s a smack of all the flavours of late-night drunk food after the pubs have chucked out. You have to smile, and food that makes you smile is a very good thing indeed.
A tiny shredded piggy croquette and a leek falafel are equally good. A leaf of deep-fried kale – it really is everywhere right now – is one of the oversalted items. Highly whipped garlic butter with their still-warm miniature bread loaves is another one, but it’s utterly compelling. That bread doesn’t have a chance. We dredge the butter away.
Our starters bring light and shade. One is quenelles of lightly herbed and dressed white crab meat, on slivers of toast surrounded by cubes of pressed watermelon and cucumber. It is bright and fresh. The other is boned-out chicken wings with sticks of salsify, crushed toasted hazelnuts and a disc of scorched leek, all of it dressed in the deepest and stickiest of chicken reductions. It tastes like all the good stuff you collect when you enthusiastically scrape your finger around the tin used to roast a chicken.
Main courses demand your attention. There’s an awful lot going on, but it does make sense. There’s a lamb dish with a seared oblong of tongue, a steak served pink, a compressed galette of potato, crisp curls of fried Jerusalem artichoke, another bespoke meaty jus and then, scattered across it, like buttons and beads, tiny enoki mushroom tops that fire flavour at the plate.
A hake dish is a complex take on surf and turf. Alongside the thick-cut fillet is a deep-fried baby squid, looking like a tiny starfish, and a thickly glazed pig cheek. There are curls of diced squid which are uncommonly tender, and this being the season for it, a side bowl of wilted wild garlic dressed with nutty browned garlic and fresh red chilli. It could so easily be dizzying. It isn’t.
But let me take a moment to get a bit excitable over a side dish of truffle and parmesan fries. Loads of places offer something like this. It’s their attempt to prove they can do filthy as well as sensuous. Most can’t. The chips are under-fried or the flavourings under-thought, or both. These are the thing: skin-on potatoes, finely chipped, given a long bath in the fryer, under an avalanche of finely grated fresh parmesan, dotted with just enough truffle oil. They are so much the thing that eventually I have to push the bowl out of reach across the table. Only a kitchen run by people who really like to eat could produce something like this. There’s a lot that’s precise about the food at Peace and Loaf. But as with those chips it’s not afraid of heft.
The best approach to dessert is the sharing plate. I’ll try to overlook the fact that it’s served on a bloody plank. Chunks of sweet, crunchy rhubarb come with fruity gel-glazed domes of wobbly custard. I don’t know how the gel glazing thing is done, but it’s damn clever. Another dome of coconut panna cotta is a little overset, but there is a pleasing intensity to the cubes of salt-baked pineapple alongside.
The star is a luscious cylinder of banana parfait with a hit of peanut. The chocolate and orange component is an endless riff, here some ganache, there some chunks, over there an (overly chewy) macaron. They ace the honeycomb. The overall impression is of a pastry section that knows how to do an awful lot of stuff and which is determined to prove it. I’m not complaining.
Starters and desserts are around £7, with mains topping out at around £20. Imagine it as £35 for three courses, with nibbles, and it becomes impressive value for cooking of such wit. How much you spend on the booze is your affair. After all, while the kitchen at Peace and Loaf may be channelling its inner child, you are the grown up.
Jay’s news bites
■ Elsewhere in Newcastle, there are the knowingly rugged charms of The Broad Chare gastropub. The website may be overly fond of words like ‘proper’ and ‘honest’, but the menu does offer up hand-raised pork pies, mushrooms on toast with mustard butter, pork belly with winter greens and scrumpy, and rhubarb crumble with custard (thebroadchare.co.uk).
■ Proof that the whole Skandi fetish is well and truly over: the 20-strong Faucet Inns chain has launched Kupp, a Nordic-inspired coffee house at the Merchant Square development in London’s Paddington. So that’s gravadlax, pastries and the sound of bandwagons being leapt upon as they pass (kupp.co).
■ The English tourism body VisitEngland has woken up to the problem faced by restaurant operators across the country, when trying to expand. There is a serious shortage of skilled cooks. A survey by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills found that 44% of vacancies for skilled workers in the hotel and restaurant industry were for cooks, with the figure rising to 66% in London.
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