‘Neat, delicate, exact, good and honest cooking’

Lovage, Newcastle upon Tyne

I know it sends tingles down your spine, your fingers fizz a little, your mouth purses into an ‘o’ shape and you emit a little ‘ooh’ sound when I dust a restaurant in breadcrumbs and dip it into the fryer. But you can’t just expect that kind of stuff week in, week out. My appraisals are honest and I don’t seek out the shockers.

Indeed, while you might relish – and when we meet, you tell me you do – the takedowns, you’ll find when you cast a glance back at my wordages that the good outstrip the bad. And there’s a reason for that: Britain is on a roll and not just in London; in fact I’d say very often not in London.

My trips around the country, north, south, left and right, fill me with excited enthusiasm. For here we are, post pandemic, mid cost-of-living crisis, mid economic uncertainty, and the passionate ambitions of certain people have seen new places emerging as if they exist on some kind of rare island of peace, unaffected by world angst and oomska. They are, of course, totally affected – it’s just that they’re brave, risk-taking self-believers.

Like the people behind Lovage in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond. A couple (he in the kitchen; she on the floor), mixing it up with ingredients grown in their own garden (he cooks; she explains), have planted a firm flag of assured confidence among the estate agents, hair salons and snack bars of St George’s Terrace.

The restaurant is a tidy assembly of wooden tables, a long leather banquette, high window seats, wooden flooring and botanical prints. Against a frosted window into the kitchen are shelves of cookbooks, potted plants and Kilner jars of pickled veg. And there are those clever, new(ish)-fangled rechargeable table lights which I eye with lust. Amid this apparent surge of shoplifting I wonder if anyone has tried to pilfer one? It would require significant sleight of hand to get them out of the place without being spotted. How about this? ‘Look at this review Sitwell has written,’ then out you dash with the booty…

But I’m here to eat, not pilfer, so here’s the lowdown. The menu is seasonal, Mediterranean-style, and the chef ’s ingredients net is wide: Cornish sardines, Italian figs, Scottish octopus, Yorkshire duck and Jesmond honey. I started with a single oyster with a tart little slice of gooseberry and perky oil of lovage. A graceful beginning after which another snack saw me dipping shards of Italian carta di musica crackers into a hummus made fragrant with mint and courgette flower. So far, so like the establishment: so neat and dainty.

Then came two crunchy soft-shell crabs, mystically melting (a wonder how you can ram down every morsel), with a perfect circle of dream-like aioli which sat on the plate like a panna cotta. I was soon wrecking it as I dipped and munched, on and on until there was nothing left. And then had the most beautifully plated confit duck. The leg sat on cavolo nero on a large, round dollop of polenta, on gravy. I cannot fathom any improvement to the dish. Rich duck, tempered by the tang of cabbage, soothed by the polenta, rounded and sweetened by gravy. I finished with a slice of tiramisu, flavoured with pistachio and one to impress the fussiest of Italian dessert aficionados.

So there you have it. Neat, delicate, exact, good and honest cooking, served with professional grace and modest enthusiasm, along with a well-thoughtout, nicely priced wine list and thus a massive thumbs up from yours truly for Lovage. Let that make you shimmer as much as a proper takedown…

I dipped Italian carta di musica crackers into a hummus fragrant with mint and courgette flower