The 5 Best Restaurants in Newcastle and What to Eat There

A restaurant inside a thirteenth-century Dominican friary, in a room the building describes as the oldest dining room in Britain — monks ate here in the 1230s. That could easily be a gimmick and it is not: the cooking is straightforwardly good modern British, with a strong showing of Northumbrian meat and North Sea fish.

Sit in the courtyard in summer. It is a two-minute walk from the Chinatown arch and completely hidden from the street.

A pub on a narrow lane off the Quayside, doing proper British pub food taken seriously: pork pie with piccalilli, potted crab, oysters, suet puddings. It is the best place in the city to eat the food the region actually grew up on, with an ale list to match.

The bar downstairs takes walk-ins; the dining room upstairs is worth booking.

Not in the city at all, but twenty-five minutes on the Metro and then a walk down onto King Edward's Bay, where two shipping containers on the sand serve whatever came off the boats that morning, cooked over wood. You eat it on a bench with a blanket, looking at the North Sea.

It is the single most memorable meal in the north-east and it works in bad weather as well as good. No bookings for the outdoor tables; go early.

Not a restaurant but the place to eat lunch. The market opened in 1835 and still functions as a working market, with butchers, fishmongers and a row of small food counters. It also contains one of the smallest surviving Marks and Spencer stalls, kept as it was in 1895.

This is where you eat a ham and pease pudding stottie: a flat, dense bread roll filled with cold ham and a thick yellow paste of split peas. It costs almost nothing and it is the most Newcastle thing on this page.

A former industrial valley fifteen minutes' walk east of the centre, now full of small independents — a restaurant in converted shipping containers turned permanent premises, breweries, a city farm, music venues in old warehouses. Cook House is the anchor: short menu, local produce, changes constantly.

Come in the early evening and treat the whole valley as one long meal.

Pease pudding, split peas cooked to a paste, is a north-eastern staple and appears in sandwiches and beside meat. Stotties are the local bread. Craster kippers — herring smoked in a Northumberland village since the 1880s — are a proper breakfast. And singin' hinnies, a griddle cake that sizzles as it cooks, are the traditional teatime thing.

Newcastle Brown Ale, first brewed in the city in 1927, is no longer made here. Production left Newcastle in 2005, moved across the river and then out of the region entirely, and the brand has since been brewed elsewhere under different ownership. The bottle is famous; the connection to the city is now historical.

The local beer to drink instead is from one of the small breweries in Ouseburn or the Tyne valley, which have multiplied since 2010.

Walk Grey Street, regularly voted one of the finest streets in Britain, and the Quayside with its seven bridges — the Tyne Bridge from 1928 and the tilting Millennium Bridge from 2001, which rotates to let ships through. Across the water is the BALTIC contemporary art centre, free to enter, in a converted flour mill.

Newcastle is compact and steep, and there is more between the Quayside and the centre than a walk along the river shows. A city game takes you around it in small teams with your phone, solving puzzles tied to real streets and buildings, with no guide and no fixed start time — a good way to earn your dinner.

It works for friends, families and company outings and larger groups. The how it works page explains it step by step.

Newcastle rewards people who eat where the locals eat rather than where the guidebooks point. See all the cities where we run games, read about the Midlands in the best music venues in Birmingham, or get in touch if you are planning something for a group.