Leaves you pining to go back 🌲
There have been some great restaurants at Vallum Farm. I fondly recall a David Kennedy popup here before he took on the restaurant and I loved that specific stint. Especially when Ken Holland was running the garden out the back. It was just made as a destination restaurant. And inside it’s a gorgeous, first-floor dining room. Currently eight or so tables, with a sprawling green view out of floor-to-ceiling windows. City-centre businesses hate this one trick…
Many restaurants talk about place and all that kind of thing. Not many are actually located on farms, in the sticks. But Restaurant Pine (Vallum Farm, Military Rd, East Wallhouses, NE18 0LL) is likely the best restaurant in the North East at the minute. No doubt you’ll have heard someone in the NE waxing about a recent visit.
Chef Cal Byerley comes from The Forest Side as a pastry chef, and previously with Simon Rogan, so this was probably always gonna be good. Pine is a tasting menu-only affair, so stop here if that bores you. I used to think I was going off anything more than 6/7 courses to be honest, but Pine has made me rethink that. We went chef’s table for Kate’s 40th.
I’ll noe labour every dish, but today’s (actually February’s) menu amounted to 18 courses, ish and unlike some tasting menus, there isn’t really one that elicits the ‘meh’ response. A lot of it comes down to technique, giving you something new in every bite. Ingredients are picked from the flora and fauna of Northumberland, as well they should be.
A salvo of snacks very much set the tone of what’s to follow. Diverse ingredients — note there is no excess of truffle, caviar, foie, or owt daft like that — and colours, textures, and flavours play together in semi-familiar ways, but new techniques make them feel fresh and interesting at every turn.
Before you even know what’s hit you, there’s carrots dry-aged to the point of becoming candy-esque. Salsify that’s drunk a beer made down the road. The more familiar King Edward and creamy with wild garlic — comforting and cosy dishes sit happily alongside more challenging sour and bitter fermentations, with lots of foraging, ageing, preserving and drying.
Turnip comes in fermented plum, because of course it does. What I couldn’t miss is that the core team are clearly all just pals having a good time. This genuinely comes through in the service, and it takes some of the sting off the bill. This isn’t Faceless Corporation 3000. Go follow them all on social — all good value.
The bread course is even more interesting than you’d expect — einkorn grain sourdough is plentiful, and made to shine with both a roasted squash, and a celeriac and black apple (more on that later) spread. Like much of Pine, it’s not particularly showy, but feels very much at hjem 👀
This is accompanied by a couple of intense pork dishes — the umber-hued broth above is made with bones and enriched with hen of the woods and anything else that would add umami. Can I have a flask of it, plz? The pork doesn’t relent, with jowl and celeriac slices glazed and glazed again then skewered. As a ‘sequence’ (hate that terminology), it’s stellar. Pace of service is great too.
Sommelier Vanessa Stoltz makes the viticultural journey an absolute delight and has to be one of the most friendly and approachable wine personalities I’ve ever encountered. And just makes the whole thing fun.
The matched wines are exactly the ones I want to have these days. Modern, producer-focused, and actually full of surprises with Slovakia, Greece, and of course England well-represented. There’s an iPad full of treats for those who have the means, or my strong recommendation would be for those with even a passing interest in wine, just leave it in the somms hands.
Given its location, driving to Pine is almost a necessity. So thankfully a matched set of softies is also available 👏🏼 venturing through things like a homemade ‘cola’, iced teas, and even NA wines. Easily the best NA drinks I’ve had in a restaurant (£40 🫠), though the bar remains maddeningly low.
This hogget main (rump, offal sausage, leg?) is charred like many of the dishes over some sort of custom grill setup that the team somehow wrangle supreme accuracy from. But the trump card here is the sauce, absolutely rammed with flavour with a punch of rose through it, taking it into harissa-esque territory. One of the best and deepest sauces in recent memory 🥲
It’s all got a deft lightness to it — especially with so many courses and a tendency to use luxury ingredients, it can be a bit of a mission to get through longer menus, but this is well-judged. Alas, the savouries have to end eventually, though sweets never go too far into diabetes territory. This rhubarb and buttermilk bridged the gap in all the right ways, and is about as ‘conventional’ a dish as we got.
A lot of places are greenwashing low food miles, sustainability, and low waste. Pine is taking zero waste seriously, reflected in its Green M* which you really couldn’t deny it. None better convey this than this most humble of dishes which is absolutely on my Best DIshes 2024 list, and maybe fave desserts ever list — ‘parsnip, caramel, (goat?) cheese and honey’.
It doesn’t look like much, but the humble dehydrated veg peeling is Pine to a tee. Honey is from their bees — caramel is tinged with verbena, and the liquorice-ish crisp of the root veg skin is as surprising as it is a perfect marriage of four things 🤯
Much like the rest of the service which manages to be as far away from formal as you can get but doesn’t miss a beat. Perhaps it’s a duck beneath the water situation, but I didn’t spot that from the eight or so staff. This is a well-oiled machine that runs calm and without vibration. But doesn’t suffer the production line / ‘going through the motions’ feel that blights more well-established/longer-serving kitchens.
The meal finishes with knotweed, artichoke, salal berry, pineapple weed, and chicory root. Bet you only one of those is familiar. Favourites being the tart salal berry syrup soaked into a brown butter madeleine — warm from the oven. And of course, ‘three-month black apple’ – a dehydrated, literally three-month-old apple that candies, and if not for a little caramel glaze, would turn your mouth inside out in a way you never thought an apple could. It’s pretty mind-boggling sweetshop stuff, and a fitting end to the meal, underpinned by a commitment to low waste, and making the most of what you’ve got.
Eating out at this level is unmistakably for most people a treat. And as much as we can hear about hospitality being on its arse etc. (it is) a lot of places seem to forget this. Pine manages to feel like a treat from start to finish, invoking a ‘lunch with friends’ vibe. Who happen to be bursting with pride at every dish, at every surprisingly modernist technique, and every leftover bit of parsnip peeling.
Not just perhaps the best restaurant experience in the North of England, but likely one of the best-tasting menus out there at the moment.
The menu is currently £155pp and will only go up so get yourself booked in for that special occasion before it does.
Contact: restaurantpine.co.uk
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