11:15am Tuesday 2nd February 2010
The chef may have moved to pastures new, but Seaham Hall is not fading away just yet.
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Never let it fade away;
Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Save it for a rainy day.
PERRY COMO was a cardigan-clad American-Italian crooner, born in Pennsylvania in 1912, possibly the first person of whom it was said that he was so laid back he was horizontal.
Known as Mr C, he had 14 American number ones, claimed the first ever Gold Disc and by the Sixties was the highest-paid entertainer in US television history. It wasn’t bad for a man whose early ambition was simply to be the best barber in Canonsburg.
His shows, memory murmurs, were equally popular over here, whole families crashed out – Comotose, as it were – before a 14in television.
Probably his biggest hit of all was Catch a Falling Star – the other side was Magic Moments – which is, of course, where we came in.
The Seaham Hall Hotel has not just lost the meteoric Kenny Atkinson, its head chef, to the new Rockliffe Park, near Darlington, but its coveted Michelin star from the 2010 guide. It was the sole twinkle in the North-East eye, for Michelin is sparing with its stars, and the decision must have been made while Kenny was still there.
The column’s theme had been decided before we headed for the Durham coast in search of falling stardust. The lady of the house advised against singing it.
“It might,” she said, “be rather less than tactful.”
MICHELIN is a French tyre company, the world’s largest. The Michelin man was first known as Bibendum, originally portrayed with pince-nez glasses on a lanyard and smoking a cigar.
These days, somewhat diminished, he answers to Bib.
The hotel and restaurant guides enjoy a great deal of what the French call cachet, and the English clout. Inspectors are professionally trained and always anonymous, advised not even to let on to their parents what they do for a living lest Mama go boasting to the neighbours about it.
What on earth do they tell the folks that they do instead?
Seaham Hall, where Kenny Atkinson was chiefly responsible for the White Room, is thus perceived to have lost its star quality, if not necessarily to have imploded.
The White Room, we discovered, now only serves lunch on Sundays.
Since it was a suitably rainy Friday, the receptionist suggest a “light lunch” – a term confirmed on the menu – in the opulent lounge.
An egg and cress sandwich was £6.95, a bowl of soup £8, lamb shank with rosemary potatoes and fine beans £22 and the dessert of the day £10.50. It may have explained why there wasn’t a soul in it.
Alternatively, said the receptionist, we could eat in the Ozone restaurant in the nearby Serenity Spa, notwithstanding the brochure’s claim that by day it’s exclusive to members and guests.
The brochure’s full of words such as “decadent” and “indulgent.” In the evening, it adds, the restaurant becomes a “pan-Asian tour de force, uniting east and west to create a continent of its own.”
The Spa, like the rest of the hotel, is very posh and, as elsewhere, very pricey. The Boss said she felt serene; she seems to think it a synonym for sleepy.
Day visitors may have lunch included, usually taken while wearing dressing gown and flip-flops – an attire rather less elegant than the surroundings – thus giving the impression of the day room of a district hospital. It was also curious that half way through what’s intended to be some serious reinvigoration, some of them looked so singularly unhappy.
Maybe they’d seen the bill.
The room’s circular, the ceiling domed, the kitchen open-plan. The menu, translated, may even be pan-Asian.
A deep bowl of corn, ginger, spring onion and sesame soup was spectacularly good, a taste of Thailand that was distinctive and delicious.
The Boss began with smoked salmon, rye bread, purple cress and a Chilean soy dressing. As invigorating as a cooling hot stone body facial and probably a great deal cheaper.
Crispy belly pork was beautifully cooked and impeccably sourced, accompanied by curried cauliflower puree – all right, but not what you’d call puree genius – and by crispy kale. There was precious little kale; not what you’d call kale and hearty, either.
She followed with a substantial salmon and king prawn laska curry with noodles and jasmine rice. Goodness knows what a laska curry is, but a lascar was an oriental sailor.
Puddings, if not dessert of the day, are £5. Apple and plum oat crumble, deep and crisp and uneven, was terrific.
The lady chose autumn fruits cheesecake which she thought “All right” but with a “rather strange”
jelly layer on the top.
With a bottle of Double Maxim (£4 50) and a glass of Chardonay (even more) the bill reached £62. It’s a hell of an expensive lunch, of course, but like the wise old barber of Canonsburg, definitely a cut above. Seaham Hall’s not fading away just yet.
MINT opened in Duke Street, Darlington, two years ago – “a most pleasant lunch”, the column concluded while contemplating the word’s altered meaning.
“It’s come to mean ‘cool’, like the polar bear’s backside in the Fox’s commercial.” Seriously uncool, the place has suddenly closed. Headed “Notice of peaceable re-entry”, a notice on behalf of Enterprise Inns advises that the lease is at an end. Yet still more places open – and more of that next week.
BACK to Battersby Junction, from which limericks still run. Denied column space last week on the grounds that his entry was rude, Tom Teasdale responds with a familiar classic:
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
In space that is quite economical;
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
THE Raj restaurant in Fore Bondgate, Bishop Auckland, is tonight (5pm-midnight) offering a special menu – £12 a head – from which all proceeds will go to the Haiti earthquake appeal. Details on 01388-451399.
TONY TAYLOR, in Sunderland, so much appreciated the opening of the column about the Scotch Corner Hotel – “When icicles hang by the wall, and Dick the shepherd blows his nail” – that he kindly sends a copy of A Christmas Book, which also includes those lines from Love’s Labour’s Lost. There’s also a quote from an anonymous but probably long-gone canon of St Paul’s Cathedral that you might as well try to heat the County of Middlesex as heat St Paul’s. This office, though rather smaller, sometimes feels like that.
NOW doubling as a real ale paradise, Darlington Snooker Club on the corner of Northgate and Corporation Road marks its 95th anniversary with a beer festival from February 25 to 28. Beer on the Saturday evening will be 95p a half, the rest of the time little more expensive.
Peter Everett, the admirable licensee, also plans to charge a tanner pint to the first 95 people who pay that much in “old” money. He’s now hoping to borrow a pre-decimalisation till. Peter’s on 01325 241388.
LAST week’s enthusiastic column on Chadwicks Inn at Maltby, near Yarm, was mistaken in supposing that the pub’s former name – The Pathfinders – was a tribute to airmen who flew from the nearby RAF station at Thornaby.
Both David Thompson and Ron Young point out that it was former owner John Liddle DFC who flew with the Pathfinders – “very brave men who marked bombers’ targets with different coloured flares,” says Ron. Mr Liddle also owned a garage in Acklam. The photograph, says David, showed Hawker Fury biplanes – “and, yes, they didn’t fly from Thornaby, either.”
…and finally the bairns rather rudely wondered if we knew what you get if you cross a birthday cake with a can of baked beans.
A cake that blows out its own candles.
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