11:36am Tuesday 16th February 2010
The builders move in, the Masonic Hall is shuttered, so happily the column plumps for plan C.
GEORDIE JENK, whose real name may well be George Jenkinson, is a Darlington taxi driver who by the nature of his rank-and-file calling does a fair bit of standing about.
He also helps to run the Three Crowns, a street corner pub not five minutes walk from the town centre but so lost and labyrinthine that 95 per cent of townsfolk may not even know of its existence.
George, at any rate, is in the habit of prowling around seeking whomsoever he may devour, or at least point towards Sunday lunch at the Crowns. “You have to try the rabbit pie. The best dinner you’ll ever have,” he insists. Finally, we went.
Thorny crowns, the builders had been in. Food was off, the rabbit run.
Instead, and almost as improbably, we headed for the nearby Freemasons’ Hall, recently refurbished and offering special occasion Sunday lunches even to those of us for whom the Craft is never going to mean more than a pedalo on Redcar boating lake.
Some of the finest beef I’ve ever eaten was at the Masonic Hall, but since it was the Butchers’ Association’s annual dinner it was perhaps only to be expected. Ads now describe the setting as “idyllic” which, given the proximity of the inner ring road and much else of an essentially urban nature, may be a trifle optimistic.
At any rate, it was shuttered.
Plan C, appropriately, we headed down the road and across the Tees to The Croft, as the former Croft Spa Hotel is now known.
The restaurant’s called Raffles, after some celebrated place in Singapore where the island’s last tiger was shot in 1902, while minding its own business beneath the billiard table. Potted palms and pot model lions attempt to add to the atmosphere.
Maybe 30 dined. A smaller restaurant would have been well-filled, this one remained two-thirds empty.
Whilst over-enthusiastic sub-editors should be discouraged from essaying the headline “Raffles is just the ticket”, save for one or two shortcomings to which we shall forthwith turn, it’s really very decent.
The first disappointment was the absence of hand pulled ale, despite the presence of the Darlington CAMRA newsletter. I ordered a pint of Theakston’s Dark, described on the front as both “smooth” and “extra cold”, wondered aloud what the opposite of a superlative might be.
“Dog rough,” said the Boss, absurdly, except – of course – in the case of the dog rough with the smooth.
Incorrigibly, it also prompted one of her favourite stories, of how the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas once described Swansea as a “lovely ugly town” – what clever folk call an oxymoron – thus prompting suggestions for an updated epithet when city status was conferred.
“A pretty s****y city,” someone said.
A single course is £8.50, two £10.95, three £13.95. Half a dozen starters included a respectable cauliflower and grain mustard soup and a tomato and mozzarella salad with well dressed and rather unusual greenery which compared favourably with many the lady had previously consumed.
The head waiter laddie, consulted, was able adeptly to explain what the greenery embraced. Full marks.
There’s a vegetarian course, a fish course – black bream with lemon and herb crushed potatoes – and a carvery. The Boss, fishing, was given an additional bowl with which to raid the carvery veg.
Among the last occasions I’d eaten at the Croft, per Mr Clive Sledger, was the Darlington Pig Association’s annual extravaganza and baconhome- bringing. They would have approved both of the pork, thick cut and full-flavoured, and of the exemplary crackling.
The vegetables, with the exception of some mushy carrots, had very enjoyable flavours, too. The Yorkshire puddings, as always will happen with a carvery unless supplies are replenished every five minutes, were like whited sepulchres. There really does seem no point in serving them like that.
Home-made spotted dick was of the good old-fashioned clootie dumpling variety, full of fruit and with a hint of lemon. Excellent. The lady passed.
None of it, of course, could drive away the recurring lyrics about getting by without a rabbit pie. Taxi for Geordie Jenk’s ere long.
BACK in October, we reported on a most enjoyable birthday dinner at the Good Beer Guide-listed Kings Arms, in Sandhutton, south of Northallerton.
The elder bairn was there, too – “marvelling not just that someone so old could still be alive but that his dad could still hit his mouth with a fork, or at least not miss it by much.”
On the pub wall, we added, was a framed Sunday lunch bill from March 1964, the days when LSD was something which might blow your budget but never your brains. Eleven adults had eaten for six shillings apiece, six children for half price.
The occasion, we subsequently discovered, had been a party for the infant David Dyson – though he is unlikely to have added to the bill – christened that morning at the little church next door.
Fifteen orange juices and a single cider added 11 shillings to the bill.
They were good Methodists – if not exactly wetting the baby’s head, then whetting it, anyway.
Vera and Henry Dyson, his parents, picked up on the story. Raymond Boynton, who runs the Kings with his son Alex, offered them lunch at 1964 prices so long as they paid with 1964 money.
It wasn’t a problem. “We still have quite a lot. No one’s interested in it, unless it’s real silver,” says Vera, from Romanby, near Northallerton.
Raymond was a bit more concerned.
“I told him they were coming with another 26. He nearly had a heart attack,” says Alex.
David, now a head teacher in the south, couldn’t make it. Lunch for two with coffee at today’s prices would have been about £35. “It would have been worth it even at that price,” says Vera. “For 12 shillings it was wonderful.”
IT was also in the 1960s that I discovered the Kwai Lam Chinese restaurant on the road to Durham Cathedral, an age of innocence in which sweet and sour pork was deemed to be close to gastronomy’s leading edge and egg foo yung inscrutably beyond it.
The invariable companion was the station master’s daughter, she who was the just the ticket.
As the Chinese new year dances in, Peter Jefferies reports that the great survivor among the region’s ethnic restaurants has finally closed.
This may or may not be linked to a decidedly lukewarm Durham Times review last April, on which the headline was “Food that’s as uneven as the floor” and the entrance was thought akin to a knocking shop.
Goodness only knows how the Durham Times editor knew. Happy memories, anyway.
A COUPLE of miles east of the city – the former Greyhound pub in South Street, West Rainton, to be precise – the Italian Farmhouse opened last Friday. Inspired, it’s said, by the Puglia region of southeast Italy, it’s owned by Mark Hird – managing director of Tavistock Leisure – and his wife Nicola. The emphasis will be on traditional Italian foods.
NOTING that signs at Wallsend Metro station are in both English and Latin, last week’s column – too clever by half – essayed the phrase “O tempores O mores!”
As Harold Heslop and Rae Black – both in Durham – point out it should have been “O tempora O mores.” Attributed to Cicero, it translates as “Oh the times, the customs!”
Harold supposes it third declension neuter; Rae’s neutral, recalling the wise words of his Latin master.
“Black, you are a genius. You dream up declensions the Romans never even thought of.”
It wasn’t, he concedes, his best subject.
...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what’s brown, hairy and wears sunglasses.
A coconut on holiday.
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/trade_directory/