Inside the Newcastle restaurant that keeps things close to home | FT Food Revolution

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So, Tim, we're here today in Newcastle upon Tyne. It's my hometown. I haven't lived here for the best part of 30 years. And we're standing on its glorious quayside, which has been actually transformed in the time that I've been away.

Lots of new buildings have popped up. It's a great place to be. And you could say the same about Newcastle's restaurant scene, as well. There's been a real explosion in all types of different restaurants here.

Yeah, I think it's an incredibly exciting city for food now. You're close to the sea, so you've got great seafood. There's amazing produce all around, tremendous game but, also, in some really interesting properties and spaces in a post-industrial environment. Also, a very, very cool populace who want to buy into that kind of thing. And that's always a good starting point.

Yeah. And one of those areas, like you mentioned, is Ouseburn, which is where we're going today. We're going to go and see Anna Hedworth, and she's the chef at Cook House, which was your restaurant of the year back in 2019.

Yeah, it was a weird story. I came up here to do another restaurant altogether. Somebody said, you've got to check this place out on your way out of town. I literally hauled in for a quick lunch.

And because they'd been such lovely people, and they were so immersed in the area and the stuff around them, and the love of cooking was so evident, I just made them my restaurant of the year. And I can't wait to go back and see them.

Yeah, me too. Let's go check it out.

Anna.

Hello.

Hi.

Good to see you.

Lovely to see you, again.

Yes, nice to see you. Hi, hi, hi.

This is Dan Garrahan.

Nice to meet you. Are you doing all right?

Come in, come in.

So, Anna, you started out as an architect. How did you end up here?

I have always had a good interest in design and interiors and architecture. And art was the thing I was always interested in. But then I realised, when I got into the job of being an architect, when people - when, actually, you realise that it isn't all drawing lovely pictures and making mood boards and that you are just mainly telling builders what depth of insulation to use - so, in the back of my mind, I was always looking for the other thing that I could do, but I didn't know what it was.

Although, I was cooking all the time. That's the thing that I was actually doing. And I'd started doing little projects on the side. So I'd started a very small food market. I started doing little pop-ups.

And then, from there, once you once you got that validation, then you went to the shipping containers. Is that right?

Yes. So it was two shipping containers. A lovely space. And it was really simple. I did everything. So I washed up, served, and cooked. And, every day I would just make an amount of stuff, like lovely big salads, some kind of roast pork sandwiches. And then people came, and I would sell that day's food and then go again the next day.

But you were already, at that point, beginning to understand a quite unique audience and to establish communication with them.

Yeah.

So I imagine, when you said to those guys that were sitting there having their pork sandwiches and had come all that way, yeah, I'm going to open a space of my own, they must have been quite eager to be the first to come here and actually pay for a real table.

Yes. And I'd built up a fan base who felt like they knew a secret that other people didn't know, and they were really invested in it. So, yes, when we came here, we already had a good customer base.

I regard it as a town, now, with quite a solid foodie scene.

Yes.

But you must have been part of building that, pretty much. You must have been in right at the root of...

Yeah. And when I was doing those markets and stuff at the beginning, I was doing it because I didn't feel like there was anywhere that you could get decent food.

Yes.

After I started doing those, other people started doing those kind of street food, pop-up markets that had already existed in London for a long time, but there was nothing like that here.

So when did you actually end up opening Cook House?

We opened here in 2018, December.

So, basically, just over a year before the world shut down.

Yes.

What was that like?

Well, we had a good run...

...I think just over a year. And then everything ground to a halt, which was very stressful.

So, now, how is it looking at the moment? I mean, costs... food costs, power costs, and that kind of thing. Is that hitting you hard?

Yes.

What do you want me to say? It sucks.

It's very, very frustrating because we work really hard, and things just keep going up, and up, and up. We always aimed that we would be open breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and we're just always here, and people can come in and be part of our home, as it were.

Can that continue, then, with this...

But I can't...

You have to put prices up, or something.

No, because we keep putting the prices up as high as we dare.

Right. There's only one way you can wiggle, and it's to shunt it onto customers. There's nowhere else.

Yeah, and then they won't be able to afford to come.

Does that make you consider moving elsewhere, maybe starting a restaurant in London, for example? Maybe...

No.

No. Committed to the northeast.

Yeah. I'm always just really thinking about what else we can do. So I'll show you, but we've got a unit next door. And that's quite a lot of space, so that has been leading to extra things that we can add onto the restaurant that then sustain the restaurant.

So this was additional space for the restaurant, but it's almost too much space. So we wanted to take advantage of that and also share the knowledge that we have when it comes to things like pickling and preserving. So we hold little classes in here about once a week.

We get, like, 10 people around here. And then they come in the morning, and then we'll make some cold pickles, some kimchi, some hot pickles. And they're insanely popular.

I was going to ask. I mean, I adore pickles. It's kind of hard to imagine there'd be the demand for a pickling class in the northeast. But, obviously, there is.

Honestly, they sell out in minutes...

Wow.

...really, really popular.

But I noticed, also, this would function as a full prep kitchen. You've got a truck door there.

Yeah.

I mean, you could basically... you could cater for 200 and get it into a van and get it out of here without disturbing the restaurant at all.

Completely, which is brilliant. So we've done...

That's solid, yes.

...weddings, outside catering, where exactly that... everything's done in here, and it just goes straight, and you don't have to even bother anyone who's trying to serve lunch or whatever in the restaurant.

I think the fact that you're selling out these pickling classes... I mean, that must really validate your commitment to the region, right?

Yeah, yeah. And I want to expand that education side of what we do... getting people in to do talks, demonstrations, classes, because there's a huge wealth of knowledge in the Northeast of people doing really interesting things and to get them and also people from outside of the region to come in and...

Has it become a foodie, tourist destination almost?

Well, it's in its infancy, but that's what I...

Potentially, yeah.

That's what I would like.

The other thing I've just noticed is the one piece of equipment that's running in here is an oven, running at an incredibly low temperature for an incredibly long time. There's something slow cooking in here, and it smells gorgeous.

I think... yeah. There's quite a lot of lamb shoulders in there, I think.

Whoa. Talk me through this lot.

Because we work with local farms a lot, often they'll have too much of something, and they want us to use it as much as possible.

So you've cash in the glass. Yeah.

Millions of pickled onions, we've got.

And pickled Hexhamshire turnip. That's bonkers. I didn't even know Hexhamshire existed.

Candies, jellies, sweets.

Some of your product is packaged as if for sale. Is that right?

Yes. So some of it will sell in the shop in the restaurant, so people can have things that were on the menu to take home.

Talk me through your rack at the back there. What is all that stuff?

So, I mean, probably the most popular is the simple lemonade. We serve it still or sparkling.

Yeah.

We've got just a soda tap, and then all of the soft drinks are simply cordials that we make.

OK, so I've got to try a cola because I... I mean, the idea of somebody actually making this from scratch is quite insane. Where did it come from?

We've had this on the list for a long, long time because when we first started, we just had lemonade, and it was the only one we had. And then we decided that it was... because it was so easy to make, we will branch out. So we said, we'll give cola a go.

And, at the start, it was a bit daunting because there was so many ingredients, and it was a lot of time to make it. But, actually, you can make it in a vast quantity. You make a big batch, and it's got so much sugar in and a lot of citrus in. It lasts for a long time.

This is why Coca-Cola made so much money out of it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's brown sugar... lots of brown sugar, lots of treacle - black treacle - orange, lemon, lime, cinnamon. You've got nutmeg, coffee beans.

Is it economical to make these things, or is it taking a lot of time and effort?

Obviously, you don't know the exact figures, but it doesn't make any sense for us to be buying cans and bottles of pre-made soft drinks in because the mark-up on them seems to be a lot less than what we can do. It's essentially a glass of soda and a little bit of cordial that we make. And I think most of our soft drinks now are £4, but they're all served in this big glass, so it's almost a pint. And we feel like that is... it's good value, but we feel like we are still making enough money on it.

Do you think they're being sensitive about price at the moment, more sensitive about price?

Soft drinks? No, I don't think so. Our soft drink prices really haven't changed over the time, and I don't think they need to. At the moment, there is a fine line of us putting our prices up or keeping them as they are because, if we put them up, we jump a bracket, and the next bracket is the expensive restaurant bracket. And we don't want...

You don't want to be there.

We don't want to be in the expensive restaurant bracket. Again, we're lucky that we print our menus every day. If an ingredient shoots up in price we're not going to serve it because we can't make it affordable.

So, in general terms, do you think money's tight up here at the moment?

Over this last year we've seen a drop off definitely at lunch time. But, actually, dinner times haven't changed much. But you can definitely see that people are not having that extra drink. I think you can see that.

So, Anna, what's the relationship you guys have got going with the farm here?

We've always had quite a close relationship with them. We're literally just over the water from them. We can run over and get fig leaves, fresh bay leaves, soft fruit... so not huge amounts, but enough that it's beneficial to both of us.

So all of our trimmings from our vegetables in the restaurant, we bring over here, and we compost them in their huge compost bins. And then that goes to feed the soil in the farm. We also, if we have huge amounts of, say, cauliflower tops or something, we can feed them to the animals, which is a nice little perk.

There's clearly a modest operation here, and you're not going to get all of the produce that you need, but a clear effort to use locally-sourced produce. And is that the case more broadly? Are you getting most of the produce that you use from the local area?

Yeah. I think pretty much all of our food is from local producers. And then, if we can't get it locally, we'll try to go just British. And then, outside of that, seasonal Europe we will use for things like figs, lemons, oranges, that kind of thing, always starting from our own doorstep and then working out as we have to.

I remember the Ouseburn area reasonably well because a friend of mine used to do band practice in one of the studios.

Yeah, up there... they're all studios.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And there wasn't really much here apart from the studios and a couple of pubs. It's really transformed, as well.

Yeah, it has. It's really nice. I used to come to this farm when I was little, and this was literally just mud and a cow. But, now, this is a really amazing place that people take advantage of every day. There's shops, there's makers, there's artists' studios. There's loads going on down here, when it just was a bit of a wasteland.

I noticed that you've got a larder shop back at the restaurant. Was that something that you pivoted to off the back of Covid? And are you selling some of the things that are grown here at that shop?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they when they have abundance of gooseberries or redcurrants or whatever, we'll be making jams, preserves, those kind of things. The shop at the restaurant was something I'd always wanted to do but actually didn't start doing it until Covid - jarring up all of the stuff that we make in the restaurant and at first just offering it for sale from the restaurant. And then we, during one of the lockdowns, we did a large amount of online sales, which went really well.

And do you think that, in the future, those kind of things are crucial, really, for restaurants going forwards?

I think, for us, at the minute, that is a direction that I've deliberately gone in to diversify the business to support the restaurant because the prices in the restaurant are going up so much, wages are going up so much. So it's something to keep us sustainable. But, also, I think it's important to continue to produce an offering that is accessible to all.

Would you be able to keep prices as relatively low as you have been able to without those other parts of the business, do you think? If you were just a restaurant, I mean, how much more difficult would things be?

At the moment, yes, but it's becoming more and more difficult. And then I think going into next year, it will still be difficult with, especially, wage increasing in April, and it's going to be testing again.

For me, this place is defined by being done with an enormous amount of personal interest and love for an individual. And I think that's incredibly rare in the world of chefs and cooks.

There's clearly a massive commitment to the region. And this is a part of the country where people are really struggling. But, actually, it's a business which is doing pretty well, relatively speaking, because of all the different and interesting things they've got going on.

The whole thing is an exercise in where it's pitching itself. It's very proud, but it's modest. Even thinking about how to describe Anna - as chef de cuisine, she comes up with brilliant ideas. She has a brilliantly inventive mind. In every respect, she's a chef.

In my head, there's an enormously powerful element of her being a cook, as well. I love the idea of that kind of... it's like she's cooking for you. It doesn't feel like a chefing thing. That feels like a...

It's a hospitality thing or appreciation of...

It's a hospitality thing.

...of hospitality.

It's a hospitality appreciation, yeah. She talks about the business like it's an extension of her own cooking for friends and for people. And it's almost like, no matter how little money there is, she'll still want to do that, and people will still want to respond to it. That's something you can only do in small towns, then. That's a bloody good thing, isn't it, surely?

Yeah. She wants to stay here. She's committed to this region, and I think the people here appreciate that. And she's almost built up a following and become part of the fabric of the city. But I was really struck by the refusal to fail with the bolt-on businesses that are really helping this place thrive. She's got the shop, and she's got the weddings. And, unbelievably to me, as somebody who lived up here for the best part of a couple of decades, she's running classes on how to pickle things.

I raise my pickle for that.

You raise your damn pickle at me, young man.