Solstice arrived on Newcastle’s Quayside at the beginning of summer. It took root on the Side, one of the few medieval streets left in Tyneside, which also boasts the Crown Posada pub, said to be about 240 years old. Newcastle is a brilliant and often overlooked city. When I was a child, on our pilgrimages from Carlisle some 60 miles away, it felt a bit like Manhattan: we’d eat stotties and Tudor crisps, then ransack Geordie Jeans for the latest ice-wash skin-tights. Coming back years later to visit Solstice by Kenny Atkinson is a considerably more refined experience.
Atkinson also owns the Michelin-starred House of Tides a quick amble away along Quayside, where he dishes up fine dining in a semi-casual atmosphere. At Solstice, however, the sky is the limit, and he has full licence to unleash his imagination and intentions to wow. This isn’t just fine dining; it is an 18-course, three-hour tip-toe through dishes so ornately and painstakingly prepared that at times it feels a shame to eat them. All that work, deliberation and manpower for a few blissful seconds during which I open my mouth like a boa constrictor and allow the most exquisite burst of silky, pungent cod’s roe, ensconced in a seaweed-green cracker and dotted with lemon verbena gel, to glide down my throat. Or a beer-laced croustade casing filled with the softest goat’s curd puree, topped with lush, green peas and garnished with pickled wild garlic capers, mint gel and chive flowers … oh, yes, and calendula leaves, too – though if I’m being 100% honest, the ingredients and genesis of each dish come at you so thick and fast, it can’t help but all be something of a blur.
Solstice is a sedate single room with a mere 14 seats, all of which are taken on a Tuesday night in late August, despite the news headlines being dominated by financial gloom. The couple behind me were on a big wedding anniversary – one they cheerfully described as “more of a life sentence” – before settling into a glorious evening of fine wine, great food and finishing each other’s jokes. There will, I feel, always be a place for the kind of cooking Atkinson and his ilk yearn to deliver, because it is special food for the most special of special occasions.
Solstice serves a tiny taste of fine, fresh mackerel topped with gooseberry gel and nasturtium, and the richest squab pigeon and veal sweetbreads. You wouldn’t want to eat like this even twice a month, but, as a rare treat, such experiences rouse parts of the brain and palate that beige carbs just can’t quite reach. Yes, dinner takes an age, but it totters along merrily, with chefs feeding you first tiny tastes of exquisite tomato churros with consommé in dinky, magnetic espresso cups, followed by the butteriest warm oyster in its shell topped with caviar, before moving on to the heavier hitters. Yes, more caviar – rather a lot of Petrossian, in fact – featured as the topping for a dreamy smoked eel and potato cream that came with chicken skin crackers.
The highlight for me, I think, was a chunky slab of fragrant langoustine with the most peculiar-looking purple potato tart hewn from langoustine claw and festooned in herbs and flowers. But then again, I should also mention the lamb course, which turned up with a voluminous mini-loaf all glossy with lamb fat and express instructions to use it to mop up the delightful gravy.
By this point, my spy work on the other customers had detected four chefs enjoying their nights off and at least three anniversaries. Plus, of course, me and Charles, for whom each day must feel like Christmas. As our dinner reached the sweet end of proceedings, I was concerned that this is where it would all go a bit “pear poached in sap” and “fragments of yeast”, because the titivations of a tasting menu do not often lend themselves to the pudding course. I was very wrong: there is a perfect, pretty-yet-bizarre-looking dessert featuring local honey delivered at least six ways, plus a plate of petits fours with shaved truffle, apple and dark chocolate that would sate even the sweetest tooth.
All incredibly long tasting menus are not built equally. For every Ynyshir, Moor Hall or Ikoyi – and Solstice is easily as impressive as those three – there are others that keep you hostage for hours, offering endless edible gold leaf and interminable pauses, and leaving you hungrier when you leave than you were when you arrived. That’s why I appreciate the theatre, the pacing and the exquisite attention to detail of the likes of Solstice. Winter may indeed be coming, but this place is celebrating the light.
Solstice 5-7 Side, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1, 0191-222 1722. Open lunch Fri, sitting from noon-1pm, dinner Tues-Fri 7-8pm, £140-a-head tasting menu only (wine pairing £85), plus drinks and service
