Much more birria than bella 🌮
Birria Bella (271 Jesmond Rd, Jesmond, NE2 1LB) is yet another restaurant trying to do one thing and do it well.
Which I’m all for. I’m not sure if theme/single concept restaurants are just the trend du jour in Newcastle, or perhaps I’m subconsciously attracted to their reassuring simplicity. But here we are. This one tackles the very on-trend dish that is birria.
The dish, made popular by birrierias in Jalisco is a stewed meat (beef chuck and short rib here) marinated in chipotle, ancho, guajillo, a lot of herbs and spices. Slow braised in an orange and fatty consommé.
Birria Bella took over the old Papa Ganoush Jesmond plot (still very much smashing it in Whitley Bay, btw). It’s a tiny li’l restaurant, though they’ve expanded with some ever-popular outdoor seating. Just get Grey Street pedestrianised, will ya?
Like so many others, it’s spawned from a street food venture. Plum in the heart of Jesmond, too, so has a captive student audience which I’m sure it does well from. And much like Detroit-style pizza, (see here for that) birria and its cousin, quesobirria, has been a social media sensation over the past few years. It is not hard to see why really, is it. It’s meat and cheese, all the beige, and the dunked-in consommé money shot that looks good on TikTok, where it still has a lot of sex appeal.
The menu shows a lot of restraint, thankfully. There’s an all-day breakfast menu if you fancy breakfast birria. Otherwise it’s tacos, quesadillas, fries, and nachos in the evening. Jarritos in several flavours, ofc.
Birria is the star of the show and you get a lot. Heaps, in fact, of meat, which is super-tender. It’s OK, and if you hadn’t had it before, you’d think, hey this is some decent slow-cooked beef from a hard-working muscle, nice. It just doesn’t carry that depth of flavour from those chiles, nor is it full of big bovine flavour like it might appear.
Fries and nachos are mere distractions. I dunno if the cheese is meant to be melted? Shame as the Tajín-shaken fries are fairly well-fried. ‘Things on fries’ got out of control years ago and at least here there’s a good amount of toppings, but it’s just excess of everything that turns to mush.
Tacos (£11 for 3) do the job, even if they didn’t excite me in the way they normally do. Maybe it was the family-friendly heat level. Maybe I should have ordered a couple of homemade salsas for an extra hit of brightness. They’re not bad at all, I’m just always hunting for the ‘holy shit’ moment these give me.
The real disappointment is the consommé which might look ace in these coupes, but is a bit thin on punch. Birria consommé can hide a multitude of sins, moisten the dish and turn OK into drool-worthy. But here what’s meant to be the most savoury, sweet, salty and spicy dipping juice is just a little flat. Maybe it’s being stretched a little too far, but it doesn’t have the potency that it looks like it has.
Tacos are imported which feels lazy but paints a picture. It’s not Barrio Comida, and even whereas Papa Ganoush took its street food product and refined it for a restaurant setting, what you’re getting is street food in a raw sense. Incidentally the restaurant seems constantly slammed with delivery app orders and so I think if you consider it more like a takeaway doing tacos, your expectations might be lower than mine were.
Speaking of which, the birria munch box… It’s a lot of food for a twenty note, but there’s no love here. It’s a plate of carbs and meat and too much mayonnaise-based sauce. Ordered hungover, it did the trick but there was a hint of shame and regret when the last remnants of the box were hoovered up. If you want something like this you’ll do better with a fat burrito.
It didn’t set my world ablaze in the way that I wanted it to, but hey, it’s quesobirria in Newcastle, and as far as I can tell it’s still the only place serving it with any consistency. I did want to love it, but if you’re looking for that authenticity of flavour, ingredients, and dedication to the craft, try Barrio Comida in Durham for a special experience. A bit closer to NE1, I’ve got a lot of time for Good Times Tacos which are more bella than Birria somehow manages to be.
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