The Rat Inn

We are regular customers at The Rat because it is such a great place with great food.
Last night’s visit was for my wife’s birthday and except for one minor thing it was as good as usual. The Rat is the very definition of an English country pub. Open fires and a cosy atmosphere are exactly what you want from a pub, add in the great food and it is hard to beat.
We shared a starter of smoked haddock fritters which was delicious if a little parsimonious for £7. Main courses were superb; slow cooked belly pork and 3 cuts of lamb; delicious, deep savoury flavours that are so hard to accomplish at home. My wife’s warm gingerbread dessert wasn’t warm which was a disappointment in an otherwise delicious meal.

Love, love, love this place! Have taken four or five different groups of friends or family there for dinner and Sunday lunch, not one person has come away disappointed or feeling hungry!
This is a real gem of a pub, tucked away up the hill just a few miles from Hexham. Have heard this is walkable from Hexham on a nice day but most will need a car — one thing to bear in mind is parking can be a bit limited and a bit of a free-​for-​all at busiest times, but you should usually get a space somewhere. Alternatively, taking a taxi is a good option, should only cost about £6-£8 from the centre of Hexham itself.
First of all, the location and setting is simply stunning. If you park across the road, the views over the Tyne Valley are fantastic. You then go into the pub itself via a lovely garden area with a pergola. Inside is a proper Northumbrian country pub, great traditional décor, roaring fires, with some unusual wall and ceiling decorations (will leave that for you to discover!) Each time we’ve visited to eat, we’ve been welcomed by the friendly staff who offer the right level of service, i.e. keeping your table clear, everything in check without being overly attentive.
The bar offers a good range of real ales, usually with a local brewery on offer, all of which are very well kept. They have an excellent range of wines and spirits as well, so you could easily go here for a relaxing drink, although the bar area is relatively small.
However, if you are here, you really must try the food. Honestly, the Rat Inn has served up some of the best food I’ve ever eaten, nothing fussy or complicated, just locally sourced ingredients cooked to perfection. What is encouraging is that there are no menus on the tables, instead you’ll find the day’s menu on a chalkboard, which indicates freshness and illustrates how much they care about what ends up on your plate. In fact, you can find out where the meats and veg have come from as the suppliers are also chalked up on the wall.
As the menu changes fairly regularly, it is not really worth recommending any particular dish on here for fear of it not being on next time, but the Sunday roast dinners are superb and the Sticky Toffee Pudding is top notch! Bear in mind you do get hearty Northumbrian-​sized portions here, it is difficult to leave here without feeling a tad on the full side…
As this place features in the top 50 UK gastropubs, it can get popular and they don’t have an abundance of space, which adds to its charm but is also a slight disadvantage — definitely worth booking in advance to avoid missing out.
In summary, the Rat Inn really is a wonderful place and one to which I can’t wait to have an opportunity to go back soon.

I had previously had dinner at the Rat and remember reasonably good steaks in a nice setting, so on a recent trip to Northumberland, we decided to stop by for lunch to see the view that everyone had talked about and try more of their menu. Unfortunately, our lunch was a huge disappointment made worse by the fact that the staff did not seem to care at all about the work they were doing.
The view was indeed worth the drive up. Stunning. They have a charming garden with a big willow tree and a pretty good selection of local cask ales. We looked out at the view from the car park and went in, feeling happy. However, it all went down hill from there. The menu changes every day, but our dishes were poorly executed, culminating in two mains rendered inedible due to extreme overcooking. To start, I had smoked salmon and my husband had onion soup. The salmon was basically from a grocery store and not particularly high-​end. It came with some salad and strangely, a big pat of butter but no bread. The onion soup was OK — not memorably bad, not memorably good. The salmon rubbed me the wrong way because for basically the same price, actually a bit lower, I had had a delicious gravlax-​style sea trout at the Feathers Inn, another Northumberland country gastropub, at dinner the night before that came with house-​pickled cucumber and a delicious potato salad — someone had clearly put thought and effort into it. This dish basically took no effort from the kitchen and was more expensive.
The mains really made me angry. I ordered coley and my husband, pheasant. The vegetables that came with the both mains were pretty good and it was clear that both used good quality protein, but both proteins were so overcooked we could not eat them. The pheasant was so dried out and tough we could not cut it with a knife and the coley felt like chalk in my mouth.
It was carelessness on the part of the kitchen staff that ruined both dishes. Since the kitchen had already closed for the lunchtime service, they were not willing to fix our dishes, and they refused to bring a side of chips for my husband, who was quite hungry. It reminded me of David Chang’s exhortation not to ruin good meat in his Momofuku cookbook (he’s talking about dry-​aged rib eye, but same principle with good fish and game): «If you f*ck up, you f*cked up a piece of meat that costs a lot of money. That somebody took care to raise and slaughter and dry-​age and butcher. That makes you an asshole.»
Fine, the kitchen screwed up — irritating but not the end of the world — but it made my blood boil when, at the end of the meal, our server, clearly seeing that neither of us had eaten our proteins, asked us how the food was. I told her that it was inedible due to overcooking. She basically smiled and said «Well, thanks for telling us what you thought,» with no offer of doing anything to fix the situation. No offer to take anything off the price. A total «f you.» When someone clearly has not enjoyed their meal, d2o not ask how it was if you do not intend to try to remedy the situation. Clearly, neither the kitchen staff nor the waitstaff cared about serving us a good meal. Still, being starving and not having time to stop at another place to eat, we ordered some chocolate cake for dessert. It was edible, at least.
I dislike, but am not necessarily enraged by, a restaurant with poorly executed dishes, and pubs that doesn’t care about the food don’t necessarily make me angry if expectations are low. But the Rat infuriates me because their website boasts about the quality of the food and all the local produce they use etc. Perhaps they assumed that since we were clearly not from there, it didn’t matter if we liked our meal. Also, the owner flames people who write them bad reviews on TripAdvisor. This should have been a tip-​off.
It’s a shame because the setting is so nice, but the bottom line is that these are not the kind of people to whom I want to give business.

What a name… What a place… The name belies this fantastic small gastropub. No wonder no-​one has reviewed it… we don’t talk about it, its so good you will not believe it the décor the ambiance. You must eat the RIB EYE its for two people mouth watering. One a warm summer afternoon just sit outside taking in the tranquility of the northumberland country side with a nice bottle of Chablis… Heaven. But hey please don’t go!!! otherwise if too many people know it will be like one of those restaurant’s where there is a three month waiting list. ah ah how do I delete this review.