Hand-reared, home-grown, corn-fed, pan-fried chillin. (Sidney's Restaurant)

Member Name: scallmorpheedy

Product:	Sidney's Restaurant
Date:	09/01/02 (289 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice town, nice food, leisurely afternoons of booze

Disadvantages: Brrrrrrrr town, the WI

You'll find Sidney’s plonked between a pharmacy festooned in enormous and gaudy advertisements for pointless vitamin supplements and a flouncy shop that caters for middle-aged exponents of tantric flautulence and the like.

Sidney’s in contrast looks understated, relaxed and calm.

After trooping into the place and having a quick squizz around, the gentle interior confirms the sense of calm to which the exterior hints. Inside the décor is stripped down plain with no curtains or pelmets or tablecloths or floral brocades. Instead there is the ubiquitous wooden floor and pine Ikea tables with their plain cutlery, sparkling glasses and napkins of regimental cleanliness and crease.

You think you’ve seen it all before and then little nuances creep in. There are slight faults on the décor; a bit of peeling paper here and there, the odd rocking table and stairs that perhaps look not too safe. This though gives the place a little something of its own, a sense that the décor is thought about yes but obsessed about no. You reassuringly tell yourself that perhaps this place doesn’t think style is everything. Even the paintings hung around the place confirm this, they aren’t pretentious, clever or well known; they are scratched paint efforts by a local artist with a distinct air of the sea. They are available to buy which is lovely but you will have no compulsion to buy one, which is even better.

The staff then approach as if apologising for interrupting your browsing. They greet you friendly and casually making you feel at home and giving you the sense that they are as excited as you are about your visit.

What you find on the menu is basically dictated by the time of year and the place you are sat. This is because the menu takes the seasons and the setting as its prompt. If the produce is fresh and local then the produce is in. If it needs a day in a plane to get there it is not. Not for here are Kan
garoo, Emu or Crocodile. Foreign imports are left to the big lights of Newcastle and not just united.

Having said that they won’t exactly neglect the world at large. What they seem to aim for is good local produce cooked with across the world influences. They take British ingredients and plop them lovingly into the tagines and cuisines of other countries. Alternatively they take a traditional British recipe and add just that foreign twist or salsa or flamenco? And on occasions they just do good old fashioned classic British grub

It’s basically what the likes of Gary Rhodes have been doing for years in “Landan Tan” but given a Geordie or Scottish twang. It’s nothing overly fussy just a little tweak here and there.

A mix of mains and starters from recent menus include:

Cod with pancetta, sauté potatoes, savoy cabbage & soured cream.
Duck liver terrine with aniseed & bitter orange marmalade.
Fillet steak with Dolcelatte, field mushrooms, shallots & chips.
Twice-cooked pork with black-eyed beans, sweet potato and coriander stew.
Halibut with anchovy and rosemary crust and bubble & squeak rösti.

The menu varies fairly frequently and starters are £3 – £5 with mains £10 - £15 though during the day there are some special deals available from a limited lunchtime menu. In fact midweek lunchtimes are probably the best time to dine. It offers the chance of great, cheap food and it is rarely full, barring meetings of the WI, which once ruined a birthday of mine. An added bonus of lunchtime dining is the opportunity to have a post-prandial wander into the local bars, the local haberdasheries of tat, or to brave the wind of the North Sea along the coast.

Alongside each item the menu also makes suggestions of wines and other drinks that might accompany the food. This is made easier by the fact that the wine list, though small, is extremely versatile and clearly selected
to match the fare.

In the whites there is inevitably a Riesling be it Australian, Alsatian or German. There is the ever-present Chilean Sauvignon Blanc along with an occasional Viognier, Chardonnay with or without Semillon and some French number. There are a few wines by the glass at around £3.50 and the bottles range from £10 to £20

Amongst the reds the absolute star in value and taste is the Beringer Zinfandel though the price of this has crept up of late. Others that tickle the eye and tongue are generally queer blends from newish South American forces therefore Argentina is usually represented in one of its Malbec manifestations as no doubt in the future will Chile in the form of Carmenere. Prices are similar to those for whites.

On the subject of wine, the restaurant holds regular themed evenings in which they will focus on the wines and cuisine of a particular region or country. On occasions other themed evenings are held to which they invite a local author to dine and answer questions. These nights, though I’ve never been to one, seem reasonable value and well subscribed to. The details of these evenings are posted to regulars in the form of a Sidney’s newsletter

Wine however is not the only tipple and the menu will often suggest a sherry or a nip of the old potato juice if needed.

So what has experience told me? This is an important question because menus can sound good but are they what they seem. Well here the answer is generally yes because the chefs at this place can cook and they can cook very well. As far as I can remember nothing has ever been cooked or served “not right,” things may have not suited my palate but nothing has been wrong. In short they know what they are doing and they do it well.

My first visit saw me try Jerusalem Artichoke for the very first time. It was a warm salad –so fashionable at the time- with Parmesan shavings, walnuts, the artichoke and
if I remember rightly a balsamic dressing. All in all the salad was a thumper with quality roaring right through it.

Subsequent visits have seen me love Thai chicken broth, posh cod chips and mushy peas. Winter warmers are a speciality and by this I mean honest to goodness red meats with special mash and gravy (or jus, as I’m sure they would rather I called it.) It seems as if the food is either super clean and light or good old-fashioned comfort

Puddings too are spectacular. Like the mains and starters they come served impeccably on fantastic crockery and in imaginative ensembles. Almost all are good and they tend to be of the obviously tempting variety. Turkish Delight Ice cream has been troughed, as has Baileys cheesecakes yum yum.

As for coffees etc I hold my hands up and admit I simply don’t have a clue, I’ve drank them but I am unable to distinguish a “Good” coffee from a “Bad” coffee, at home I drink Nescafe and I’ll freely admit that I’m a booze and food man.

All in all a meal for two with wine, tipples to commence and coffee and a cheeky snifter at the end will cost 60 - £70. If dining at lunchtime this could easily be halved.

So now for criticisms, they had to come.

One is that whilst the service is usually good on occasions cutlery can be neglected, particularly between courses. Similarly the service can be slack when busy, never more so than when you find yourself seated downstairs in the intimate basement. The lavatories are clean but could do with investment. The layout of the place is generally good but on occasions it can be a touch too cramped making tipsy trips to the loos an obstacle course of elbows.

The proximity of the table to each other can also make privacy difficult; I once overheard the intimate details of a marriage that was bitterly falling apart, though this may of course be viewed as a plus point.

Finally,
and nit-pickingly, the menus go in for the old hand-reared, pan-fried, oak-wood-smoked malarkey. Whilst this is occasionally useful for some dishes it can sometimes smack of “Oooh look at us, aren’t we clever.”

All in all, the place probably suffers a touch for its popularity, a touch for its local wah-wah-wah clientele and it has probably outgrown its shoes, hence presumably the new opening in Newcastle

So that is Sidney’s. If you are in this neck of the woods and if you have the choice why not pop along to where it all started, because by the looks of it it’s the kind of place that may go big-time possibly national and possibly TV.

Ps. Tynemouth is ten miles east of Newcastle and is about twenty minutes away by metro

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