Cook House, Newcastle: ‘Relaxed, exciting, intimate’

Photographs Gary Calton

I’m talking about a place where the pubs – yes, pubs, are alive and well in the Ouseburn! – are vegan and the warm barnyard stink from the city farm’s pigs overrides the waft of vapes down the old river. It’s true that in many UK cities, Victorian warehouses in the shadows of viaducts are repurposed into artists’ studios and blackened factories turned into taprooms, but the Ouseburn is up there with the best of them. And at its pumping heart, lodged in the valley like the figs in my forthcoming almond cake, is my dinner destination.

Cook House started life in a pair of nearby shipping containers before this iteration was crowdfunded into existence in 2018. Its self-taught chef-owner is Anna Hedworth, who is also a fine food writer: Nigella Lawson raved about her second cookbook, Service, which came out earlier this year, and that’s as close to a royal warrant as you get in this hierarchical industry. Hedworth has another restaurant, Long Friday, in chichi Jesmond, a mile north, but Cook House is the mothership, the one that was here long before the current burgeoning of Newcastle’s food scene, which now includes street-food markets, one of the most hip Michelin-star restaurants in the land (Pine) and a proliferation of cool independent restaurants.

It’s just to the east of the Ouseburn, a slim tidal river at the trickly end of its range when I cross it early in the evening to meet my local Geordie pal Ailsa who, when I first met at Glasgow uni was a Tennent’s-swigging vegetarian and is now, as these things tend to go, a teetotal carnivore. On Cook House’s other side is a looming Rolls-Royce and Bentley garage, a reminder that there’s industrial chic and then there’s… industrial. The Ouseburn is home to plenty of both. The restaurant is housed in a sparse black cube, previously an architect’s office where, with neat circularity, Hedworth, who trained as an architect, used to work.

There are two levels: one more subterranean, the other a light-filled upper section where, happily, Ailsa and I are seated, from where we can see Hedworth, and her team of three, cooking in a bright, open kitchen. The vibe is relaxed, exciting, intimate. So much so that it’s empty when we arrive. Good. Is there anything better than pitching up at a hip neighbourhood restaurant at the start of dinner service? By the time we leave, at 8pm – not very Ouseburn of us, I know, but we’re middle-aged, and I’ve got a train to catch – every seat is full, the lights low, the music high and the transformation into buzziest neighbourhood restaurant in town complete.

The menus are locally sourced and so seasonal that they’re printed daily. The wine selection, including a gluggable white and a red on tap, is excellent. Everything’s made in-house, from sodas to an exemplary kimchi so funky it brings me out in a sweat to admit we almost didn’t order it. (It also, like great kimchi, brings me out in an actual sweat.) It comes in a bowl so deeply filled we ask to take half of it home, and I’m still kicking myself that I insisted Ailsa have it. House pickles are superb: sweet golden beetroot, turnip so thin you can see through it, carrot and ultra-aniseedy fennel: each veg preserved to taste more strenuously of itself.

Potted crab comes with a gold seal of clarified butter, the russet meat sweet and delicately spiced. We scoop it up with a fluffy milk bun softly kissed with cardamom, calling to mind Diana Henry’s description of the dishes it flavours seeming “like a ghost has walked through them”. Our only criticism? We would have liked two.

Barbecued oyster mushrooms possess the requisite bounce and nuttiness, but lack smokiness. The dish is colder than expected, and roast koji mole (an on-trend Japanese-Mexican collab) lacks oomph. The result? A dish less bold than it deserves to be. The addition of salad burnet – a cucumbery herb I’ve had only once before and never forgotten – is, however, inspired. This is Hedworth’s genius: to not give you the flavour your palate expects (in this case, coriander), but something so perilously close to it that you get a jolt of pleasure, then go: “What the heck was that?”

Roast hake is perfectly cooked, though the sea of sweetcorn puree in which it swims is too sweet. Hedworth’s use of more unloved cuts of meat, however, shows a genuine commitment to sustainability. Consider grilled ox heart, on tonight with chips and peppercorn sauce for £25 to lure diners away from steak. It works: many are ordering it. Not me. My head is turned by barbecued lamb chops with burnt aubergine, sheep’s curd and orange sauce – a dish that’s doing nothing outlandish and tastes exactly as you want it to. This lot can grill. On their outdoor terrace is a self-built barbecue (and hot and cold smokers) where they get up to all sorts of geeky things – including, every Sunday, roasting sharing chickens, which you order ahead on the phone.

Desserts are best of all. The butteriness of fig and almond cake is offset with whipped yoghurt pooled with herbaceous bitter fig-leaf oil. A blackberry ice-cream choux bun comes with cream spiked with salt, vanilla and basil, bringing out floral notes in the herb we think we know so well. In essence, it’s the best ice-cream sandwich you’ve ever devoured.

Hedworth tells me that their longstanding relationship with Ouseburn Farm – they trade, back and forth across the river, scraps from the restaurant to feed the animals with produce from the farm – has led to a new beekeeping project. And she’s about to open Wren, a neighbourhood bar focused on cocktails, biodynamic wines, house-made soft drinks and small plates, on the same Tardis-like site. Yes, every city should have a Cook House. But that’s impossible, because the point of Hedworth’s terrific community-minded restaurant is that it’s deeply embedded in the fabric of the city that made it. It could only be right where it is.

Cook House, Foundry Lane Studios, Foundry L, Newcastle upon Tyne NE6 1LH (0191 276 1093; cookhouse.org). Snacks from £6; starters from £11; mains from £24; desserts from £9; wines from: £32