Tucked away in the beautiful riverside village of Ponteland in Northumberland, Eleven is a relaxed, hyper-seasonal modern British restaurant that celebrates the best of British food and produce. The restaurant was set up by chefs Danny Land and Ryan Carr, and front-of-house manager Stephen Pitfield who joined forces during the pandemic to realise their vision of what a local, neighbourhood restaurant should be. As well as working with great producers across the UK, the trio also do a lot of their own foraging, introducing wild Northumbrian produce into their menus.
Inside, Eleven has bistro smarts with bare wood tables, plush banquettes and a mixture of wine bottles and chic artwork lining the walls. The restaurant strikes a nice balance, managing to be relaxed and informal, but still serving elevated dishes that fit large or small occasions from a casual midweek meal to a birthday gathering or celebration.
The dinner menu comes in a few different formats - a five course and a three course, with vegetarian and vegan menus available for the former. Dinner starts with bread (at the time of writing, a fermented potato bread with cultured butter) then continues into snacks like Berkswell toast and carrot with smoked cod's roe, before moving into mains - on the regular menu that's a Dexter beef hangar steak with wild garlic and Jersey Royals, or celeriac, roasted yeast and kale on the vegetarian menu. All the menus change regularly depending what produce is in season and what the team manage to forage, so you're likely to find different dishes on the menu if you're a regular visitor.
The vegan menu, meanwhile, is a fantastic display of what can be achieved with vegan cooking, starting with snacks like fermented chilli crackers and black garlic potato, before serving dishes like rapaudine beetroot with alexanders and horseradish, purple sprouting broccoli, tropea onion and roasted yeast, and Williams pear with oats and yoghurt.