There’s a strong breed of restaurants now with some shared characteristics and in need of a catchy name. Wish I was good at catchy names. They are emphatic about local sourcing of excellent produce, usually with a strong element of foraging mixed in. They embrace seasonality and delve extensively into ancient, and particularly Japanese, techniques around fermentation, curing and preserving. They are unafraid of powerful flavours, with bitter and pungent notes common. The setting, decor and crockery are always earthen tones, usually modern-yet-rustic. And they are among my favourite places to eat, although there are odd exceptions.

Pine is right in there among them. They don’t have any lemons in the kitchen, because lemons don’t grow naturally in the UK. Local flavours like gooseberry or wood sorrel are used if a citrusy sharpness is needed. You might see this as pretentious, but most creative folk know this: setting yourself some artificial constraints often leads to the very best results.

We spend a leisurely four-plus hours finding our way through a fifteen course tasting menu, in a modern space perched incongruously above a rural industrial unit surrounded by fields a stone’s throw from Hadrian’s Wall. Pre-prandial cocktails include pine, gooseberries, lavender, white asparagus and miso (that’s across two drinks, mind!). Then we get stuck in.

I absolutely love their filthy potato dish, smoky puree on top of caramelised shallots, crispy batter scraps and wild garlic capers, drizzled with a reduction of cucumber juice so massively reduced that it’s actually black and almost a glaze. Then really impressed with a highly original scallop dish: the lovely little uncooked scallop laid on top of a blob of silky yogurt laced with jalapeno. White currants scattered around add spiky little bombs of juice.

Their emmer bread is as splendid as any I’ve eaten this year, and the very funky raw cream butter whipped up with some kind of funky miso-type ferment of grain and black garlic is impossible to stop eating. The herb butter alongside is pretty, but doesn’t stand a chance. There’s also a great beetroot dish with little nuggets of gummy max-flavoured beetroot lurking under a lovely richly-flavoured cheese cream. Also barbecued hogget sausage and sweetbread washed down with a saucer of wonderful hogget broth.

The fish is a nice piece of plaice in rich lobster sauce, but the main course is absolutely knock-out. The carefully slow-cooked and multiple-smoked piece of pork loin is easily one of the best pieces of pig I’ve ever eaten. It would be a complex and complete dish with absolutely nothing else on the plate. The two pieces of belly fat have been treated the same way and are even more naughty. There’s a wonderfully funky sauce made with hen-of-the-woods, then a splendid puree as well as a pickled dice of aubergine, and finally topped with an earthy blob of fermented sourdough miso goo. I always love it when the main course turns out to be the best dish of the menu.

Their dessert game is also first class and stuffed with invention. A simple plate of delicately treated berries with a scatter of sweetly flavoured herbs, pine granita and a dollop of clotted cream is a great start. The three layers in the next dish – sharp gooseberry foam, funky-hay-sweet woodruff mousse and nutty-earthy chicory crumb – are individually brilliant and work together even better. Lemon verbena meringue tarts with a scorched top leave their bright lemony flavour on the palate for ages after we scoff them. Oh, and lest I forget: the final petit four is a piece of bramley apple dried for three months until it is like sour-sweet toffee and coated in black bitter caramel. Only for the brave, and so good.

So there you go: you must try and get up to Northumbria and visit Pine. They’re absolutely show-casing what you can do with ingredients that grow and live in the UK, and I’m so intrigued to visit in a different season as I expect the menu to be radically different and also aces. It’s currently £160 a head.

How has it taken me so many years to visit Newcastle? It’s a lovely place. Handsome centre and riverside, lovely revitalised ex-industrial art district, loads of friendly people, lots of good food ‘n drink. Recommended: Deep North for ace doughnuts and coffee. It also has a blindingly good restaurant in Solstice. I’ve meant to visit House of Tides for years and never got around to it (see comment about never visiting Newcastle!), but Kenny Atkinson’s new place is smaller and boasts an even more enticing menu so we came here instead.

It’s a fairly straight-forward dining room, no open kitchen here, the focus is all on the menu and the plates on the table. Something like 14 courses, each one small but perfectly formed. The presentation is wonderful but it’s the clever and unabashed flavour combinations that star.

The very first snack, a smoked eel brandade with excellent caviar and a tiny dice of granny smith apple, is nothing new but the nut-brown chicken skin crackers to scoop it out with elevate the dish to truly sleazy pleasure. More big-flavoured snacks include a ball of duck liver parfait encased in a madeira & PX gel and a takoyaki ball, but filled with rich lamb shoulder instead of octopus.

A couple of the very best dishes were seafood. A charming rose made of thinly sliced black radish interleaved with slivers of raw halibut, dressed up with lime, yuzu and sesame oil. A scallop everso delicately cooked in beef fat, topped with a fiery Thai glaze, deeply caramelised – the contrast was great, just an amazing mouthful. The main fish dish was pollock, although both the delicate fish and its accompanying fripperies were overwhelmed by a richly smoky sauce made from Craster kippers. It was a very yummy sauce, so I can’t argue too much!

The main course might be the star of the show. Very flavour-packed lamb loin, so delicately cooked, served with a beautiful gravy fired through with warm and citrusy Sichuan peppercorns. A baby white turnip was the only accompaniment, stuffed with a peppercorn relish and topped with lovage cream. This little bite was another piece of perfection.

Desserts were strong too. Very much loved the tiny sticky financier with a distinct amaretti flavour, a boozy sabayon and a tart pineapple jelly on top. Best by far was the honey parfait with rye ice cream – the two flavours of honey and rye pair beautifully into a sort of sunny-summer-grass-meadow fantasy. Strong petit four game too, particularly a chocolate with tamarind and chilli notes in the filling.

Re-reading, I’ve somehow done a poor job at emphasising just how smashing every single dish was across this menu. It’s easily my meal of the year so far (and we’re to July already) if that makes things any clearer? The menu at Solstice is £175 currently and it is really strong on invention, strong on flavour, but very elegant in execution and presentation. It’s magic, the service is warm and friendly, very personal and deeply enthusiastic about what they are doing. Go!