Omni Café, 12 Front Street, Monkseaton, Whitley Bay NE25 8DF (0191 251 2819). Breakfast dishes £5-£15, lunch and dinner dishes £9-£18, desserts £3.95-£8, wines from £25
Some dish titles do all their own marketing. At Omni, a Vietnamese-inspired café tucked into the end of a shopping parade just outside Whitley Bay, they offer a “12-hour beef shin and peanut curry”. It’s a luscious kind of poetry; a line which deserves to be unpacked word by word. The presence of shin is promising. The more a muscle works, the more flavour it offers. Shins do stuff. But it takes care and lengthy cooking to get the best out of one. Those 12 hours should do it. Being robust, shin appreciates big flavours, so cooking it down in a rugged curry paste makes sense. The addition of peanuts promises serious depth, but also something hinged in that enveloping place between sweet and savoury.
