11:01am Tuesday 16th March 2010
Challenging times – to eat a burger with decorum in what was once the setting for royal assignations.
WYNYARD HALL is very grand; wonderfully elegant. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, architect and author, thought it the most splendid 19th Century mansion in the country.
Edward VII was very fond of the sumptuous old place, too, though – unless the “rumpty-tumpty” of which he liked to speak was a hitherto- unknown architectural expression – for possibly different reasons.
Much his favoured companion on such trips north was Mrs Alice Keppel, 29 years his junior, a lady said to be possessed of alabaster skin, blue eyes, chestnut hair, large breasts and a vivacious personality.
Apart from that, it was impossible to know what the king saw in her.
Built in the 1820s for the Londonderry family, the hall cost an astonishing £130,000 and became a favourite haunt of many others of the nobility, frequently including the Duke of Wellington. A 127ft obelisk in the park commemorates his visit in 1827.
Disraeli loved Wynyard, too. “I never left London with such a sense of relief or such anticipation of happiness,”
he once said. What, was Dizzy at it, an’ all?
After the war it became a teachertraining college – not, perhaps, the usual classroom simulation – and in 1987 was bought by Sir John Hall, he of the MetroCentre and of Newcastle United.
Now, still owned by Sir John, it’s being developed into a top-range hotel and conference venue, the famous golden gates opened to all.
Having misread the ad, we arrived a few days early for the new threecourse lunch (£19.50) but were shown instead to the Mirror Room, where an all-day “lounge menu” is served and where a plaque recalls that, in 1903, good King Edward held a Council there – the first in a private house since 1625. Mrs Keppell is not mentioned.
The Mirror Room reflects opulence and Windolene. A gilt trip, as it were. It was thus a little disappointing – the first of several disappointments, as things turned out – that not only did no one offer to take top coats but that they had to be slung across the back of the chair as, say, in Binns cafe. It probably never happened to Benjamin Disraeli.
Service is otherwise semi-formal, from young men in smart waistcoats who pour – as is the custom – with one arm half way up the back, as if subject to some invisible Chinese torture.
Since a Newcastle Brown Ale was £4.50, I ordered a bottle of thoroughly invigorating sparkling mineral water – just £4.10 – while awaiting the soup and the burger. The water was Glenlivet of Speyside. Can you imagine a Scot’s reaction on being offered a wee drop of Glenlivet of Speyside and discovering he was on water?
The wait also offered the chance to read the winter issue of the hotel magazine in which new chef Jason Moore, a bouncing Boro boy, is introduced.
Jason, clearly a man with an appetite for the job, promised to mingle. It is unlikely that he can mingle unobtrusively.
The Boss tried to recall, and had to be urged to recall a little more quietly, the link between Georgie Fame and the Londonderrys. He should not, in any case, be confused with Geordie Fame. That’s Sir John, too.
The soup was fine in a slightly effete sort of way – whatever happened to meaty, muscular soups? – a chunky burger (£10.50) compensated admirably. It came with thick-cut chips – Jenga chips in this house – and delicious, wholly decadent onion rings but posed a familiar problem for all that.
How do you eat a burger in polite company? What would Sir John have done? Would he have remembered his Ashington fetchings up and picked it up with two hands or discerned Lady Mae’s disapproving eye and used a knife and fork instead? If such things may be possible with a beefburger, I chickened out.
From the “lite bite” menu, the Boss had smoked salmon with dill blinis and creme fraiche – £8.50, entirely acceptable – and followed with the “local artisan cheeses”
with walnut bread and chutney.
She asked what the cheeses were.
The waiter had no idea. She asked a few minutes later why the advertised walnut bread had arbitrarily been replaced by a few perfunctory biscuits.
The waiter said he’d find out. She awaits the answer yet.
We asked for the bill. When, ten minutes later, no one had literally been within sight to collect it, we marched off to reception – Michael Winner would have been proud – to suggest that someone might like to take our money. The girls, very pleasant, seemed unflustered.
It was at that point that Sir John himself – now 76, little changing – came into reception. It was one thing grumbling on to the ministering angels, but to the Hall mighty?
Whilst contemplating what first to ask him – whether he ate burgers with his fingers or whether they really didn’t care about old money – he was gone again, striding across green acres.
Old Chinese proverb: you can give a man a fancy waistcoat, but it does not mean he’s got all his buttons.
■ Wynyard Hall TS22 5NF – near the villages of Wolviston and Thorpe Thewles. Telephone 01740- 644811 or visit wynyardhall.co.uk VIGILANT to the nth degree – and why the nth degree, anyway?
– many readers noted a misprint in last week’s column.
Johnny Pino, a youthfully approved drink of apparently fond memory, should have been described as a “knicker dropper” and not as a “kicker dropper”.
Bill Callan, in Richmond, was among those who essayed drollery.
“A drop kick gets three points, so a dropped knick is surely worth a try?”
Eric Gendle was just glad he was able to remember.
For Jim McMillan, it stirred late- Fifties’ memories of Saturday night dances at Woodland village hall in west Durham. “There’d be hundreds up on the double decker from Bishop Auckland and West Auckland, always off at Butterknowle for a few Johnny Pinos in the Diamond first.
“If there wasn’t another bus to Butterknowle, they could probably have flown.”
MARTIN Donbavand, who started the trail of the lovesome Pino, is further moved to recall raucous school dinners at Wingate Modern and the subsequent escape hatch to Johnny’s Café – fond memory – in the front street.
“Lunch would be a glass tumbler filled with oxtail soup, with a smashed-up bag of Tudor beefy crisps on the top.”
Ah, he says, not even Baldasera’s in Wheatley Hill did croutons.
COXHOE’S a biggish village just off the A1, about four miles south-east of Durham.
A cafe called The Bank – still a large and doubtless empty safe in the wall, still a Barclays ATM machine outside – cheerfully served a huge bowl of tasty spicy tomato soup and a “de luxe” breakfast panini made slightly less sybaritic because they were fresh out of sausages.
It was well filled – both cafe and panini – locals clearly appreciating huge and inexpensive servings of mince and dumplings and similar staples.
A subsequent walkabout revealed that Coxhoe has at least three other cafes, all similarly inexpensive, plus a food-led pub at the end of the village and at least five takeaways.
Don’t they ever eat at home?
The population can’t be above 5,000. Is Coxhoe the cafe capital of the North?
BURROW surveyor, we noted a few weeks ago the reputed excellence of the rabbit pie at the Three Crowns, an old-style street corner pub near Darlington town centre.
Sadly, food hadn’t been available.
Nor is it likely to be for several weeks, while structural work is undertaken.
Last week, however, the Brainless Britannia B played dominoes there – and they’d baked a vast, rabbitwhole- in-one pie just for me. Gosh it was good; lovely pastry, too. Impossible to eat it all, we offered it among the rest of them, though it might have fed half Darlington. Run rabbit.
...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call a dinosaur that’s always on time. A prontosaurus, of course.
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