Greggs Bistro x Fenwick Newcastle Pop-up

Local Legends 🤝 Local Legends

Over the past decade, Greggs has become a proper UK behemoth. Call it a result of the financial crises, England’s love of fast food on the go, mass proliferation (there are more Greggs in the UK than McDonalds or Subway), or just because people love a bit of flaky pastry. Greggs has been unstoppable of late.

The Gosforth fast food giants’ (they cannily dropped the ’bakers’ moniker more than a decade ago now) – latest gimmick marketing collaboration wasn’t with Primark, PlayStation, or another ‘on-brand’ business, but with other local fave Fenwick. Parisian-inspired ‘Bistro Greggs’, or simply, a Posh Greggs. Side note — if you’re looking for work at Greggs or in the wider fast food industry, Jooble offers a wide range of job openings.

I wanted to dislike it. These things are often ill-conceived. More ‘how many press features can we get’ than ‘is this a good idea’. (In)famously, Greggs Moment didn’t last too long on Northumberland Street, offering a same-but-different approach to a Greggs Café. It came with afternoon tea, cutlery(!), and I was a fan.

But scarcity is everything, and for this popup, every single table was booked for the whole of the month in December. Couple this with quick service, a fast turnaround, and a presumably decent average spend, and this must have been canny profitable, all things considered.

We went along a couple of times, and it was great. Greggs mainstays, with a bit of Fenwick finesse.

Short menu, Greggs things, with some sides added. The Greggs Benedict is surely the hero product here. A (really rather decent) hollandaise drapes a well-timed poached Cacklebean egg. There’s smoked ham. It’s not on top of a toasted English muffin, but a sausage, cheese and bean melt. Annoyingly, it works wonderfully.

As does the veg curry bake with hot-smoked salmon, and a creamy curry sauce. Something of a kedgeree-inspired pasty dish. It was the morning after the work Christmas party, and I smashed it.

Even better were the main courses.

They did, however vary in quality, effort, and creativity. Swapping a sausage for a… sausage roll… in the Full English is lazy work, and chucking a peach melba (foil tray and all) onto a plate with some cream surely didn’t take too long to conceive. But the headline dishes, I couldn’t help but love.

Seasonal and personal Greggs Hall of Fame item the festive bake comes with properly sauteed bacon & chestnut sprouts, and duck fat roasties. Sure, cranberry sauce is too sweet (when isn’t it), but the sprouts are great, and it’s just a fun and substantial eat for £8.50. The other headline dish and the one that makes the red carpet is the steak bake with truffled dauphinoise (phwoar) and green beans (nar). There’s additional gravy, in a boat, and it just works.

It’s OTT, in the right kind of way. White tablecloths and cloches are hushed along with string quartet covers of modern pop songs. It’s just about tongue-in-cheek enough to pull it off. Fenwick service staff keep the ship sailing straight, and it’s all cannily priced. Or it was, until we tacked on some champagne — ’fuck it, it’s Christmas’, or something, which seems to be an attitude shared by many when we visited.

Desserts range from the why-bother Yum Yums with caramel sauce, to a really-canny-good Earl Grey crème brûlée and Greggs Christmas cake. I had an affogato with — and I bet no one had this in their 2023 predictions list — ice cream rippled with Greggs mince pies. Desserts are barely a fiver and short of adding a sparkler, couldn’t made you giggle much more.

Elsewhere find afternoon tea which didn’t float my boat; just bits of chopped-up various cakes and pasties, which I thought was a bit half-arsed. Surely Greggs’ pre-packed sandwiches are mean enough with the fillings that they’d make ideal finger sandwiches anyway… Lots of good wine from the food hall, and the stottie’s solitary appearance is grilled with the Christmas Lunch soup.

Unfortunately, if you’re only reading this you’ve now missed the pop-up which was just for December. But with Greggs’ rate of expansion over the past decade, don’t be surprised to see a Bistro Greggs hitting your local high street or department store concession in 2024… and why not. We could all do with a laugh.