Dear Readers,

I want to let you guys into a little secret. We haven’t been living in Newcastle recently. In August 2013 we left the North-East to embark on a year abroad in Chengdu, China. Chengdu is located in south-west China and is home to 80% of the world’s pandas! MrJ studied Mandarin at Sichuan University and I taught English at a chinese public school. In total, I taught over 1,000 kids how to speak English. (Don’t believe me? 22 classes x 50 students in each class = 1,000+!) We just arrived back to the good ol’ toon this week.

Why didn’t we tell you? Well, our blog gained popularity because it showcased all the best places to eat in the North-East. I didn’t think it would be fair to our readers if we suddenly stopped talking about England and started talking about Chinese food that is only available on the other side of the world! 

So that’s the reason this blog has been a little bit lacking. We’ve tried to fill the gap of our departure with guest bloggers; who were fantastic and wrote incredible blog posts. (A big thank you to you all!) We also tried to focus more on foodie events, since we weren’t visiting any restaurants.

But now we’re back, and super-excited to see the food scene developments that have taken place in the past year, we’re ready to jump back into food blogging with gusto! Be prepared for some restaurant reviews, interviews with local businesses, ideas where to shop locally and much, much more. But, because we can’t just quite shake off the hold of China yet, our next blog post will be a one-off feature of everything great about the food scene in Chengdu. It’s an officially recognised UNESCO City of Gastronomy, and was given the recognition before other Asian countries like Hong Kong! We’ll give you the lowdown on street food, sichuan-style spice and hot pot!

Thank you to all our readers who keep this blog alive. Even though we’ve not been around, the blog is just going from strength to strength, with our best performing month of all-time being June 2014! We are grateful for your support, and hope you will stick around for all the exciting things we have planned.

Lots of love from,

Scobberlotch