🔟 years of being the best in Whitley Bay
The Roxburgh, well it’s my kinda place. In a sea of bland recent openings, it’s a rogue, a loose cannon. It has always played its own game and is not interested in ticking boxes, creating dishes for TikTok, following the latest food fads, gimmicky presentations, or pissing about with tweezers.
With that in mind (and perhaps because of that), it manages to escape the usual common sense of the Michelin inspectors and Good Food Guide, and I don’t really know why, because it is, and has been consistently great.
Chef/owner/lone ranger and local lad Gary Dall had previous stints with the boss (no, the other one), cooking in Oz, and then famously for company like Amy Winehouse (kebab?), and Sting (tofu salad?) before finally opening the Roxburgh as a cafe in 2014.
Fast forward a decade, Amy has sadly left us, and Whitley Bay now regularly tops the charts of best places in the UK. The menu has evolved — at one point there was an a la carte menu, Sunday lunch pops up occasionally. There was the world’s best bacon sandwich. Dog biscuits (yep). A dim sum popup did dim sum better than 99% of places in NCL. The occasional Roxburger popup continues to be popular.
It’s now tasting menu only on a Friday & Saturday night. I’ve got a love/hate relationship with tasting menus at the moment, though as ever with The Roxburgh, a bit more fun than normal, and a manageable 7ish courses. For its tenth year, The Roxburgh 10 menu featured classic throwbacks to its early days, and the last ten.
A two-bite Welsh rarebit rekindles the cafe days, along with a sausage roll of delicately flaky pastry, juicy pork, warm and freshly pulled from a hot oven. C’est super.
Pig’s head in croquette format is everything you want from a crunchy golf ball of piggy bits, all scrunchy, fatty, and with just enough acidity to balance the plate.
It’s all a little bit DIY, but like a demo version of a classic album though, the guts are there. Don’t expect excess polish, fannying on, or over-the-top anything. The whole gaff is run by about four people, which for me gives it supper club vibes, in a good way. The restaurant used to be BYOB, but the wine list has thankfully improved over the years, and we enjoyed a Hugel Riesling from the eager service team.
Citrus-cured trout (top) is a surprisingly good version of this dish. Done to death, with beetroot and apple a classic combo. This was a better take on it than most, and despite no dearth of food, never too rich or heavy.
Brandade finger is a deceptively simply hunk of fish, with a well-balanced tartare sauce, and sweet peas. Coastal theme, some local influence, I hear ya, and I love it.
Bone marrow on toast, on loan from St. John is also (an ongoing theme) one of the best versions of this dish I’ve had. The intensity of beef is off the charts, it’s real get it all over your gob and slobber it down your chin nose-to-tail eating which has always been part of the furniture here.
Slide to unpeel a crispy egg with chips and Roxburgh ketchup. It’s an old cafe fave, and what the fuck do you mean you can’t have egg and chips on a tasting menu? It’s perfectly executed, from jammy egg to ‘proper’ chips, and the Roxburgh sauces are classics. I simply defy you not to want it.
‘Snouting for truffles’ is a chocolate mousse with crumb soil that I thought might be a bit naff at first impression, but there’s a lot to love, with fairly simple chocolate flavours propped up with an interesting variation of textures — and the buried chocolate truffles a welcome surprise.
Goody Bag Parts 1 and 2 come in a doggy bag for later. It’s a good amount of food, so very welcome. Ingots of fudge have a lovely texture with a coffee the next day, and a baseball-sized cheese scone keeps the party going right through the next day. It’s comically sized.
When pondering on restaurants these days, more often than not the ones I want to eat in are the ones making food that you feel as though the chef wants to eat themselves. Of course there’s a place for fussy and experimental. But somewhere like The Roxburgh restores your faith that there are chefs out there who understand how to answer the question of ‘what do people actually want to eat when they go out?’.
Chef Gary says ‘he cooks on his terms’ and I just love that attitude. Others will say customer preference trumps all, but the Roxburgh’s decade in Whitley has proven that punters want a good feed more than ever.
It is a restaurant that is always gonna be going its own way, carving its own destiny, and doing what it wants to do. And for that, we should be grateful for places like The Roxburgh on our doorstep, and encourage and support more diversity and self-standing independents. Before they leave us. This month we’ve seen nearby stalwarts Papa Ganoush depart, as well as personal fave Bawn, on top of Ophelia and Barrio Comida. Tough times out there. Go eat at your local.
Contact: theroxburgh.co.uk
Address: 4 Roxburgh House, Roxburgh Terrace, Whitley Bay, NE26 1DS
Important info: Make sure to book ahead, only open Fri/Sat. We took the bones home for Chase to enjoy some hard-to-reach marrow nuggs.
See also: Michelin-rated restaurants in Newcastle & beyond
Related Posts
