Review: Pine, Northumberland

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.