New city centre home for popular eaterie

THE popular Cook

House restaurant in Newcastle is ready to begin a whole new culinary chapter as it re-opens in a new city home.

The kitchen-style set-up, which whipped up a huge amount of interest in its former shipping container premises in the Ouseburn, now seems set for bigger and better things as it relaunches in Foundry Lane.

Its new city premises are just a short distance away from Ouse Street, where the tucked-away business managed to secure national attention, but this time they’re “bricks and mortar” as Anna Hedworth points out.

It’s more than four years since Anna, a food blogger known as The Grazer, set up the Cook House whose rapid-growing reputation for good food soon earned her a loyal customer base.

High points over that time have included mentions in the Good Food Guide; being featured in Michelin-star chef Michel Roux Jr’s Hidden Restaurants series for Channel 4 and being named Best Cheap Eat in the North last year by Observer Food Monthly.

But low points must have been the cold, space limitations and the leaks that sprang up in the two shipping containers from which Anna served up the seasonal dishes which created such a stir.

It’s a testament to her talent and hard work that a Kickstarter campaign which she set up to help finance a move to bigger and better premises proved such a success.

And now that she is ready to open the Cook House doors in Foundry Lane her former regulars – as well as new customers – will find the business is now spread out over two levels, with a cafe downstairs and restaurant upstairs which means Anna can expand on her former breakfast, lunch and occasional supper club offering into evening meals.

There are plans too for cookery classes and a Cook House products range.

Cook House opened yesterday and Anna said: “It has been such hard work; we are all exhausted but it is all worth it now that we are nearly finished - or just beginning!”

To book a table, the new restaurant email anna@ cookhouse.org