Aidan's Kitchen — Restaurant in Newcastle upon Tyne

First time to visit and it was prompted from my maps recommendations based on places I normally visit. Happy to say, I'm glad I went - the food and service was amazing!

The place seemed really popular as it was packed - good thing my friend reserved seats for us in advance. We came around the 12:30 time slot and left about 1:30ish, and people were still coming in!

The space itself is not huge, but the ambiance and the atmosphere was relaxed and welcoming. It had a homey feel to it. I would say, on the inside, I would estimate seating good for maybe 40 people? There were also plenty of picnic benches outside, if people opted to sit and eat there.

For parking, I didn't see a lot of parking spaces available, but if you live around the Jesmond or City Centre area, its easily accessible. I'd say roughly 10 minutes walk from Jesmond metro - on a sunny day, thats not bad at all!

Also, I don't know about toilet facilities, as when we visited, none of us needed the toilet - so will definitely come back to find out 😅.

Service was excellent. Servers were nice and friendly, and couldn't do enough for you! We were extremely grateful for our server today, she got an extra chair for us and was so pleasant - we love her!

For ordering food, you get menu cards as you are seated and the servers come to the table to collect orders. They also serve the food altogether - which is nice (because you won't have someone left at the table looking at what everyone else has while they're awkwardly waiting for their food to be served). Then, when all the foos has been devoured, pay at the till. Very straightforward experience.

Food was amazing - you could tell that it was made fresh and with quality ingredients!

I had the meatball marinara (sandwich?) OMG. An explosion of taste and flavour. It was very comforting! We were a party of 7, and almost each one ordered a different dish, so we had a little taste of everything. Everything was brilliant!

I'm glad we visited - I think we've found a local gem!

Excited to come back to try the...

edit to reply to Aidan: Hi Aidan,

Thank you for your reply. Your ordering systems seemed to have automatically gone off at 2:01pm because an order collected at 2:31pm would go past your listed kitchen close time. I hoped that feedback would be helpful.

I did comment on my experiences previously and rated the food 5 stars in this review.

If I walked over and arrived at 2:30pm/waited, would I not have been told the kitchen was closed and not taking orders? How could I commit to another hour of roundtrip walking without knowing if you would even serve me when I arrived?

Would it have been difficult to say: "I'm sorry you were disappointed this time, I'm glad to hear you enjoyed your food previously. We were exceptionally busy to answer the phone on this instance but it isn't the norm. Hope you will be back soon to give us another try"?

Your patronising reply makes it feel like take-out orderers are treated as lesser customers and like my negative experience is invalid because I have enjoyed previous visits and happened to not leave a review. Original review

I hate to leave negative feedback since I really enjoy the quality of food here, but I wasn't allowed to order today.

I walk in with my dog from about an hour away to get takeaway from Aidan's occasionally. I'll normally place an order on the webapp and pick it up with no issues.

Today I tried to place an order while walking over at 2pm. The kitchen per the app closes at 2:30 and the restaurant at 3pm. I wasn't able to place an order because a time slot wasn't available...okay I'll give them a call! 5 attempts to ring and no answer.

I just had to give up and walk back home disappointed. To clarify, I tried to place an order one hour before the restaurant closed and would have collected half an hour before...

Food was excellent. Staff were kind however, there were definitely a few things which happened which means we won’t return.

We had a 1:30 booking for 5 people. We arrived at 1:27 and staff told us it’ll be a few minutes which we were happy to wait for as we were early. We didn’t end up getting seated until around 1:45 as a table were still paying. This isn’t the staff’s fault as we understand this can be out of their control but we would have appreciated at least getting a menu whilst standing outside.

We were sat on a small round table which was too small for 5 people. There was no way food and drinks could comfortably be put on this table. This table could have fit 4 people max. However, this was quickly rectified as we asked to sit on a bigger table when one party had left and the staff let us sit straight away.

Our food arrived around 30 minutes after we ordered but our drinks hadn’t arrived yet. We asked for an update and were told the drinks hadn’t been made yet and the ticket hadn’t been seen. The food was great, though we did ask for an extra egg which hadn’t arrived for one of the dishes. The drinks arrived a couple minutes after we had asked and even then, the coffee was bitter and the smoothie was tasteless. We asked for an orange juice instead which was incredible.

Overall, this was a mixed experience but the food was fantastic and staff were lovely. However, we would not return as the cafe seemed too small to deal efficiently with the amount of people...