Housed in shipping units by the Tyne, Träkol serves food so delicious you won’t be able to contain yourself
Hillgate Quays, Gateshead NE8 2BH (0191 737 1120). Small plates £3-£8.50, mains £11-£8.50, feasting £40-£70, wines from £15
About an hour into our dinner at Träkol, one of my companions sits back. He surveys the outrageous platters on the table and says: “I think this may be my new favourite restaurant in the whole country.” It’s a big bold statement, but it’s one I can get behind. Träkol, located in a nest of renovated shipping containers tucked under the Tyne Bridge on the Gateshead side, is not some colonically irrigated, Botoxed and depilated gastro palace. It’s not going to wrench you through the torture garden of faine daining. It’s something so very much better than that: a ragingly modern restaurant determined to feed you with the seriously good stuff, until you slump back and say, enough already.
It takes serious skill and nerve to grill a beautiful fish like this whole turbot and get it right
Tomatoes are salt baked, cooled then layered with slices of pink lamb heart on toast with anchovy
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