Faru

A Silver Street Address, and What It Signals

On Silver Street, one of Durham's oldest thoroughfares running down toward Framwellgate Bridge, a neutral exterior and subtle signage give little away. That understatement is deliberate. Inside, baby-blue walls, well-spaced circular tables, and an antique stained-glass window frame an open kitchen where the cooking happens in full view. The physical environment positions Faru within a specific current in British restaurant design: pared-back, technically serious, where the kitchen rather than the décor is meant to catch your eye. This is a room that asks you to watch, not just eat.

That spatial logic connects to a broader shift in how the UK's regional dining scene has repositioned itself over the past decade. Cities outside London — and outside the traditional country-house circuit that runs through properties like Gidleigh Park in Chagford or Moor Hall in Aughton — have developed smaller, city-centre tasting-menu formats that operate on ambition rather than scale. Faru fits squarely in that cohort.

Durham's Tasting-Menu Moment

Durham has historically been a cathedral city, a university town, a weekend destination: the kind of place where the dining conversation was shaped by tourist footfall rather than local culinary ambition. That framing has been changing, and Faru represents the clearest evidence of the shift. Holding a Michelin Plate (2025), it occupies the upper tier of Durham's restaurant market alongside Coarse, which applies a Modern British lens to the same price bracket. The city's wider contemporary dining options , Little Bull, Nanas, Nikos, and Seraphine , operate at a different price point and with different ambitions, which makes Faru's tasting-menu format something of a category of its own locally.

The kitchen is led by Jake Siddle, who spent nine years at Newcastle's House of Tides before opening here. That provenance matters less as biography than as credential: House of Tides is one of the North East's most significant modern kitchens, and the discipline of that training is visible in how Faru's menus are structured. Laura Siddle manages front of house, and the combined effect of their respective roles is a room that runs with what critics have described as making "a huge difference to Durham's dining scene" , a phrase worth noting for what it implies about the baseline that existed before.

The Format: Five or Ten Courses, Lunch or Dinner

Tasting-menu formats at this level have standardised around two questions: how many courses, and how much involvement does the kitchen allow itself? Faru answers both with a five or ten-course menu available at lunch or dinner, matched by a wine flight if you want it. The structure follows a familiar contemporary rhythm , a series of small plates building toward a central savoury and closing through dessert , but the flavour register is less predictable than the format suggests.

The kitchen opens with Parmesan shortbreads, a direct calibration bite that sets a savoury, technically clean tone. From there, the dishes move through territory that draws on a wide set of influences without losing coherence: pork beignet with apple and vanilla custard; barbecued lamb glazed with black garlic; lobster tart; hen of the woods mushroom with chive emulsion, pak choi, chicken fat, and yeast crumb, finished with mushroom dashi poured tableside. Honey- and orange-glazed duck arrives with smoked beetroot dusted in Cambodian Kampot pepper, a chicory chutney, and a fried press of potato and duck leg. Desserts maintain the same precision , a hazelnut parfait built on praline, rum jelly, raisin gel, chocolate tuile, and banana sorbet. Coffee arrives with petits fours: a lemon cheesecake and a lime and pineapple jelly.

The flavour vocabulary , Sichuan pepper, duck jus, black garlic, Kampot pepper, pak choi , reflects a wider pattern in current Modern Cuisine tasting menus across the UK, where European classical technique is applied to a global pantry without the dishes being classified as fusion. You see the same approach at L'Enclume in Cartmel and, at a different scale, in how Scandinavian kitchens like Frantzén in Stockholm and its Dubai outpost FZN by Björn Frantzén have normalised multi-continental ingredient sourcing within rigorous classical frameworks. Faru operates at a smaller scale and a different price tier, but the underlying philosophy aligns it with that current rather than with traditional British regional cooking.

The Wine Programme

Matched wine flight for the ten-course menu runs to five pours, opening with an English sparkling wine before moving into less predictable territory. The selection includes an oaked Oliver Zeter Sauvignon Blanc Fumé , a Pfalz producer whose wines occupy an unusual stylistic position between Bordeaux Blanc and classic Sancerre. Including a bottle that requires that kind of contextualisation signals a programme that is thinking about wine as editorial content, not just beverage accompaniment. For the broader wine angle in Durham, the full Durham wineries guide covers regional options.

Where Faru Sits in the Wider UK Scene

UK's tasting-menu tier has a defined upper bracket: The Fat Duck in Bray, The Ledbury in London, and the full Michelin-starred roster that concentrates around London and a few rural destinations. Faru is not competing in that bracket , a Michelin Plate, rather than a star, places it in the tier of restaurants that Michelin's inspectors consider technically accomplished and worth knowing, without the full star endorsement. Within that tier, the comparison set is other serious city-centre tasting-menu operations outside the capital: restaurants where the cooking is consistent, the format is tight, and the local significance outweighs the national profile. The £££ price point confirms this positioning , it is priced for special occasions and food-focused visitors, not as an everyday option in a university city where most spending sits lower.

Planning Your Visit

Faru is at 29 Silver Street, Durham DH1 3RD, within walking distance of the city centre and the cathedral quarter. The five and ten-course menus run at both lunch and dinner, with matched wines available for the ten-course format. Google reviewers rate the restaurant at 4.8 from 56 reviews, a score that reflects a consistent experience rather than a high-volume operation. Given the format and the small-plate structure, the ten-course menu with wine matching represents the most complete read of what the kitchen is doing , the five-course option works if you want a shorter commitment at lunch. For the broader Durham picture, the full Durham restaurants guide maps the city's options across price tiers, and the hotels guide, bars guide, and experiences guide cover the rest of a visit.