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Generosity abounds for Jay Rayner at Omni Café in Whitley Bay Some dish titles do all their own marketing. At Omni, a Viet- namese-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. What arrives is a stupidly soothing coconut-based stew, full of friendly caramel tones, but with an added slap of chilli at the end. It’s similar to a mas- saman, but with texture from the peanuts. There’s half a lime for add-your-own acidity and coriander to bring fresh aro- matics to the party. It lives up to its own marketing. I went to Omni for the beef
and peanut curry; I stayed for everything else. Here come spice-dusted shrimp crackers, warm from the fryer, with a shrimp-based sambal, heavy with toasty notes. Here are sweet-sour pickled vegetables, sprightly with fresh herbs. From the specials there’s
crispy pork belly, fried with Thai basil, garlic, oyster sauce and fresh chilli and served draped with a crinkly-edged fried egg. The skin belonging to a trio of huge chicken wings has been pulled back so that, when bat- tered and dropped into the deep fat fryer, it fluffs up like a golden taffeta skirt, the better to be dragged through the sweet- sour dipping sauce. Hulking ribs have been braised and chilled before being dusted in spiced cornflour and deep fried to create a lacy carapace over soft, melting meat. Be generous with the gochujang sauce. At lunchtimes there’s a selec-
tion of banh mi, the famed Viet- namese baguettes. Ours arrives
layered with Asian slaw, and the meatiest of deep-fried oyster mushrooms. It is the size of my forearm. I have big forearms. There’s also a ludicrous hay- stack of squid salad, which rises from the plate like the beehive on Cindy Wilson of the B-52s.
While it’s striking to behold it’s a little underdressed, but that’s only when eaten alone. Taken alongside the rangy high-kicks and hoopla of eve- rything else on our table, that mellowness becomes a form of culinary respite care.
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WWW.OMNICAFE.CO.UK/OURFOOD
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