Amazingly, something positive has come out of lockdown —or at least the threat of it. Normally before a trek to a restaurant I need to be pretty confident it’s worth it. (You try submitting expenses for a complicated schlep you’re not writing up with a breezy “Nah, wasn’t really that interesting.”) But at the time of booking Pine, another lockdown was looming, allowing a bit of the old gung-ho. What’s the worst that could happen? At least I’d get a trip somewhere. Elsewhere. Anywhere.
And what an elsewhere it turns out to be. Vallum is a huddle of former farm buildings, gift shops, gym, café. It seems an unlikely setting for one of the UK’s most exciting new restaurants, but open the mind and the barns and acres of countryside could be more off-radar Sweden than a 20-minute cab dash from Newcastle. I’m reminded of Daniel Berlin Krog in the middle of nowhere at Skane Tranas. After dinner at Pine, that comparison with one of the world’s great restaurants stands right up.
In an upstairs room we find half restaurant, half industrious open kitchen. There’s so much room between tables it feels completely luxurious: fur throws over chairs, views for miles. The place even smells heavenly, like a walk in a forest where, out of sight, someone is cooking something utterly delicious.
The food is even more special. First to arrive is a sparkling broth, madly beefy without any meat: roasted yeast and celeriac, sheer savouriness. It’s like celestial Bovril, magic miso. From then on in, it’s one exciting mouthful after another. The cumulative effect is almost dizzying despite occasionally off-putting titles. “Garden juice” or “Snowball turnip, fennel yoghurt with fermented plum” are not whispering sweet sybaritism in my ears.
But the juice is an alive-tasting emerald shot, vivid, verdant. (The pal is less keen: “I’m suddenly in a Nordic spa.”) And the turnip number is a delicate barnstormer, the crisp root stripped of its bitterness, yoghurt set into something like savoury panna cotta, hint of sour-sweetness, a bravura balancing and layering act. Unsurprisingly, chef-owner Cal Byerley was formerly a pastry chef: that precision is the tell.
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The novelty of chefs serving their own food has worn off for the embarrassingly over-restauranted. Here, cooking is so extraordinary you want to know details. Even their own bread and butter, served in what looks like a pristine bird’s nest — I’m not even irritated by this, or the wine cooler resembling a dinosaur’s egg — is superb. A dramatic green herb butter particularly: baste me, I’m done.
The usual robotic script is missing too. In a beetroot dish — one of the many that still swirl around my head next morning —the root is turned into something with the texture of wine gums, its earthiness tamed under a foamy blanket of Dale End cheddar, crunch coming from nibs of einhorn and “last year’s walnuts”. “How the hell did you figure out how to do that to the beetroot?” asks the pal, writer of bestselling food books. “I was very, very bored,” Byerley says. Another upside of lockdown: imagine.
There are 16 small courses — complexity married to simple brilliance. Don’t expect a blockbusting three-ingredients cookbook from this lot anytime soon. One opening snack is a fat little buckwheat pancake topped with chopped raw venison (“aged fallow deer”), its smoke flavour recalling L’Enclume’s coal oil, a nod to Byerley’s background at some of the north’s greatest gaffs. On top is a sprig of preserved spruce and tiny infant pinecone. God knows what they’ve done to this, but its nutty, pickled-walnut sweetness lifts the whole thing to another dimension.
There’s not a duffer dish, misstep or moment of ennui. We’re enthralled till the finale — “confectionaries”, each one a tiny masterpiece: beeswaxed cannelés as good as any from Bordeaux, glossy white chocolates, macarons fragranced with the likes of anise hyssop. By this point in the tasting menu pomp I’m usually a bit over it — not here, not for a nanosecond. This lot go beyond the hackneyed “local, seasonal” blather. Way beyond. Many ingredients have an almost preternatural freshness — those that haven’t been left to languish in their own juices for months until they chew like a Starburst — as if they’ve been pulled from the earth minutes before finding their way into our faces.
My only carp — we’re seated facing the kitchen, not so much table as amphitheatre tier. It’s fascinating to watch: choosing the most perfect petals of Brussels sprouts for dotting over bubbly mussel sauce with steamed plaice; dunking shiitake into a boiling bath of beef dripping. (This is another doozy, the mushroom as meaty as long-aged steak, pungent with the sweet funk of black garlic and a “gravy” of bone broth.) But I could have lived without witnessing the clear-up afterwards, as puncturing as watching the stage set being struck before you’ve left the stalls.
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We’re ferried there and back by the only taxi driver in the village, a fount of information about Pine: who’s in a relationship with whom and how in his opinion it’s far superior to [redacted local Michelin star] and [redacted other local Michelin star]. He’s more like an Italian cabbie than the usual Brit wouldn’t-waste-my-money breed. Byerley and his cohorts come via the Forest Side in Grasmere — clearly quite the talent incubator — working with Kevin Tickle, who has just opened Heft in Cumbria (as I mentioned before Christmas, making the obvious jokes).
This brigade hasn’t spent lockdowns playing Candy Crush or watching Tiger King, but plotting wizardry, playing nutty professors with the fruits of their gardens, farms and fields. Lockdowns suck. So to find something so life-affirming has been brewing over those dead, bleak months is simply joyful. Just January and already I’m happy to put money on this being my restaurant of the year.
Twitter: @MarinaOLoughlin
Instagram: @marinagpoloughlin
Selection from the tasting menu
£90 per person for 16 courses
● Sugar kelp dumpling with North Sea trout
● Berwick Edge cheese, carrot and lovage
● Aged fallow deer tartare, juniper and pine
● Fennel and mead-cured sausage with sumac
● Snowball turnip and fennel yoghurt with fermented plum
● Seeded sourdough with house butters
● Smoked pork bone broth, chanterelles and magnolia
● Beetroot, cheddar and last year’s walnuts
● Garden juice
● Steamed plaice with smoked mussel sauce
● Artichoke cone with roasted dandelion root
● Confectionaries
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Drinks
Bottle of Mathis Bastian Riesling £49
Total
For two, including 10% service charge £252
Pine, Vallum Farm, Military Road, East Wallhouses, Northumberland; 01434 671202, restaurantpine.co.uk
Plate of the nation
McCain’s Jackets aren’t such a half-baked idea after all
Who, I scoffed with every fibre of my lofty restaurant critic being, would buy frozen baked potatoes? Nothing more, nothing less, just part-cooked spuds in a box? Say hello to McCain Jackets, four uniform potatoes “lovingly slow-baked” (puh-lease) with a touch of sunflower oil, at first glance the very zenith of kitchen apathy.
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Sure, I’ll give one a bash. Into the microwave it goes, a sad little item, a lunch of inertia, to be eaten in solitude and sagging tracky bottoms. But weirdly I’m impressed. If you’ve ever reheated a baked potato, you’ll know how it never quite works, how they seize up into waxy, unloveable chunks. McCain has done something that makes the interiors as fluffy as if they were freshly baked. And when I do a subsequent spud in the oven, it delivers that alluring crisp skin in — well, I’d love to say 15 minutes, but it’s 45-55. Which makes me question why you’d bother with the things at all, especially at nearly 90p a pop. Still, as instant microwave staple, heaving with butter and some of that leftover Boursin, to my mortification, I’m in.
McCain Jackets, about £3.30 for four at supermarkets
