Back story (From The Northern Echo)

Back story

8:41am Tuesday 1st July 2008 in Reviews

The buzzing Back Room truly deserves to be at the forefront on any list of places to eat.

JOURNALISTS call this bit the intro. It's where the most salient or unusual bit of the story is meant to be.

It should at once be recorded, therefore, that the sun shone last Wednesday evening.

It streamed, striped, from somewhere west of the motorway and through the Back Room window of the Three Horse Shoes in Leamside, simultaneously warming a debate about how Venetian blinds came so to be named.

Not even The Lady of the House knew; though (of course) she waffled a bit. Not even Google can suggest a satisfactory explanation - not what you might call an open and shut casement, anyway. It may be an example of the seriously myopic leading the blind, but theories would be welcome.

Over a three-course supper we also fell to discussing the difference between "imply" and "infer", between "alternatives" and "options" - you can only have one alternative - and between "cultured" and "cultivated".

The place over the road sold cultivated grass, though whether it had read the Complete Works of Shakespeare - or even The Merchant of Venice - was another matter entirely.

Leamside, at any rate, is a former colliery place - the pub's in Pit House Lane - about three miles east of Durham. West Rainton, where memory suggests that the local pit was called the Adventure, is nearby.

The bar's a classic, up to nine hand pumps - mostly from micro breweries - real cider, bare floors, good crack. A pity about the flat-screen televisions, it seems to me, and yet more incongruous because the Back Room restaurant is blessedly music-free.

Last time we were there, the restaurant had been but a gleam in the eye of Daryl Coates, who had the highlyacclaimed Saltgrass pub in Sunderland and still runs the Kings in Sunderland and the Old Courtyard, the former Biddick Arts Centre, in Washington.

The Courtyard even won a Radio 2 award for the country's best folk club.

The guy's a bit of a Midas.

Now the Back Room is bustling reality, one of a number of reader recommendations - this one from John Heslop, in Durham - after that little plea two weeks ago. Thanks for them all.

It's impressively attired - polished floors, modern art images, seats out the back for nights such as this. Main courses from an interesting menu, as inexpensive as bangers and mash at £4.95, sometimes have a Greek flavour as a salute to the sous chef.

There was pork souvlaki, kleftiko and, of course, moussaka. It's possible that the names are as authentic as the cooking, but the column has a theory that they're taken at random from the Athens telephone directory. John Motson probably practises with them before the European Championships.

So it's Wednesday evening, 7.30pm, and the place is heaving. Stowed out.

Talk about heat and kitchen, it must be like a boys' own Adventure in there, though they appear manfully to be coping.

Never mind Gordon Ramsay, even the urbane Sir Alf might have a word or two to say under such pressure.

When a table becomes free, it's almost immediately bagged again. In the Victorian pits it was called hot bedding, though this was altogether more enjoyable. Food for two about £40.

She'd started with mussels with a tomato and basil sauce, served in the sort of pot in which a comic book cannibal might have had someone for tea.

The sauce, she thought, was a particularly good idea.

I'd begun with the souvlaki, probably left back for some Greek Premier League side, a sort of kebab with a genuinely Mediterranean salad. It was followed by a fleshy, finely flavoured Cajun chicken. The courgette fritter could have been fitter, but the accompanying vegetables were excellent.

The Boss in turn thought her sea bream fillet fresh and frolicsome, served with a roast vegetable salad.

Our puddings -chocolate and hazelnut and lemon tarts - were perhaps a bit too cloying but overall it was one of the most enjoyable experiences for ages. Honest; swear blind.

■ The Three Horse Shoes, Leamside, Durham - 0191-584-2394.

Food seven lunchtimes and six evenings. No problem for the disabled.

BECAUSE the day's labour is unending, we headed from Leamside down the A1 to the Surtees Arms, in Ferryhill Station.

It was the launch night of the inhouse brewery and since it's at the rear, the brewery's called The Yard of Ale - the perfect excuse for just nipping out the back.

Alan and Susan Hogg took over the Surtees, off the A1 at Bradbury, early last year. Already committed to real ale - he declines to sell smooth stuff, much less to sup it - he now makes his own.

The only casualty, alas, has been the pub football team which changed in the brick outhouse before it was commandeered for higher things.

The debut brew is a 3.8 bitter called First Yard, and having travelled precious little further than that, it was in great good nick.

Alan's a former engineer, a good lad and a realist. "I know that pubs and publicans are going out of business all the time, but I was determined to brew my own," he says.

"If the Surtees and its brewery close, it certainly won't be for the want of hard work." The Yard yardstick's highly encouraging.

DARLINGTON CAMRA has again produced a free glossy guide to its branch area's 120 real ale outlets - and not one, it might be whispered, whose door the column has failed to darken.

Last year we were so enthusiastic about it - "Magnificent, meticulously detailed, beautifully produced and enthusiastically executed" - that the encomium is reproduced on this year's front cover.

The good news is that it's again invaluable, comprehensive and as occasionally idiosyncratic as ever. Few other guides might note "a fine display of saucy postcards in the gent's"

(at the Rose and Crown, Romaldkirk), a "statuesque railway guard" (presumably having a long wait for a train at the Old Well in Barnard Castle) or the plaque at the Hole in the Wall in Darlington Market Place which marks the exploits of former landlord George Butterfield, an Olympian exactly 100 years ago.

As with all good consumer guides, the prescient may occasionally even be able to read between the lines. It's available at any of the pubs thus embraced.

and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew why the butterfly couldn't get into the dance.

Because it was a moth ball, of course.