Why we don’t serve bacon (& what we do instead!)

At Ardallan Kitchen, we like to think of ourselves as a local Gateshead bistro serving up a mixture of traditional and contemporary food made with fresh, local ingredients. We do things a little differently here—from making all our own soft drinks with natural ingredients, to changing our menu regularly based on what’s in season. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, but we do want to make it our own.

One question we’re asked more than you might expect is:
“Why don’t you serve bacon?”

Given that a lot of our menu leans towards breakfast and brunch, it’s a fair question. The short answer is that frying bacon—delicious as it is—creates a greasy steam that clings to the air, coats surfaces, and demands a setup in the kitchen we just don’t have room for. Our space is small, and we like to keep it focused and efficient.

But there’s a bit more to it than that.

We’re often asked why we don’t serve bacon when we do serve sausage sandwiches. And it’s a fair challenge. The truth is: we make an exception for sausages because the ingredients are exceptional. We use Lincolnshire sausages from Charlotte’s Butchery, just across the river in Gosforth, and they’re honestly the best we’ve ever tasted. We also make our own vegetarian Glamorgan sausages using cheese, herbs, leeks, and the leftover crumbs from our daily sourdough. Our customers love them—and after three years, if we ever took Charlotte’s sausages off the menu, there might be a minor uprising.

It would be easy to offer a bacon sandwich just to keep things conventional. But we didn’t want to go down the “same as everywhere else” route. We wanted to be a little different—and that’s how the Ardallan Breakfast came to life.

We realised that most of the components of a traditional cooked breakfast were already on our menu in some form. Smoky beans (thanks to our house cassoulet), thyme-roasted mushrooms, daily-baked sourdough toasted to order, and those glorious free-range eggs from Charlotte’s—scrambled, poached, or fried. Add sausages, and it was almost all there.

But something was missing. That’s when I stumbled across a cookbook I’d been meaning to add to my collection for years: Lavender & Lovage by food writer Karen Burns-Booth. I’ve got a bit of a cookbook habit (they have their own room and colour-coded shelving in the main house), and I follow Karen’s work on Instagram. In the book, she shares a recipe for bacon floddies—crisp breakfast patties made from grated potato and onion, remembered fondly from her grandparents in the North East.

That stopped me in my tracks. I’d heard of floddies before, but hadn’t realised they were so local. A bit of digging revealed that they’re believed to have originated in Gateshead, which pretty much sealed the deal for me. From humble beginnings as a working-class breakfast dish, floddies have evolved in countless ways—sometimes with bacon when times allowed, sometimes plain when they didn’t. The Vegetarian Society even includes a version made with sun-dried tomatoes and herbs.

We decided to do both.

Now, you’ll find two types of floddies on our breakfast menu. The bacon version accompanies our meat-based Ardallan Breakfast, and the sun-dried tomato and herb version is served with our vegetarian Glamorgan sausages.

It’s a dish that feels like us. Familiar yet different. Rooted in North East tradition, but with a twist. And best of all, when I plate up an Ardallan Breakfast, I know that every single element—whether it’s the toast, the sausage, the eggs, or the floddie—has either come from someone we know or been made by us, from scratch, in our own kitchen.

And to me, that’s what makes it worth doing.