Yvette's Cafe, Norton (From The Northern Echo)

Norton, but nice

1:58pm Friday 2nd September 2011 in Reviews By Mike Amos

Little point in DIY, a huge breakfast underlines that it really should happen to Yvette.

YOUR starter for ten – or, more accurately, for £3.60 including a mug of coffee – is one of the biggest breakfasts with which working man may ever have started the day.

The main course will prove rather more expensive.

Jean Crawshaw, who taught for 40 years in Stockton before retiring to rural Northumberland, wrote recommending Yvette’s (and several other places).

“Whenever I’m back in Stockton, I always skip the hotel breakfast and go straight to Yvette’s,” she said. “Varied breakfasts, lunches at silly prices, immaculately clean, but no frills.”

Jean also said she could write a book about 40 years in teaching, but that’s no doubt another story. “Besides,” she added, “no one would believe the bizarreness of it.”

If not quite DIY, Yvette’s cafe is effectively tacked onto the back of Jewson’s near the Horse and Jockey roundabout, where Stockton meets Norton-on-Tees.

It may have the world’s most unprepossessing entrance and worst-dressed clientele – unless high-viz jackets and short green wellies are now haute couture over that way – but allow neither, for a moment, to be off-putting.

Outside, there’s a notice indicating the whereabouts of the waste transfer station – the Arsenal have had a few waste transfers of late – and a pile of Jewson bricks labelled “not best”.

This may well be a trade term but raises immediate questions, nonetheless. Second best?

Not very good at all? Bloody useless?

Inside are four tables, 16 chairs and copies of The Sun and the Daily Star, the latter leading its front page with the headline “Amy: my boobs will win Big Bro.” It seemed rude to ask Amy who?

Other than the lady’s prize assets, the only other adornment, the frill-a-minute, seemed to be a picture of flying geese, or something, on the wall.

Yvette Fox cooks, occasionally emerges to replenish supplies, does it with much cheeriness.

No less breakfast bright, her sister Linda Knowles serves. The “small” breakfast is £2.65, the large £3.60 and the “attack” £4.95.

Clearly this was once the “heart attack”; perhaps health and safety intervened. The £3.60 job was massive, great value – three plump sausages, two eggs, bacon, black pudding, very tasty mushrooms, beans, tomato, three slices of toast. “I put you some more bacon on, it didn’t look very much,” said Linda.

A steady stream of workers built up, departing with large polystyrene containers – the 21st Century bait box – filled to the gunnels with hot food. Another £3.60, including any soft drink.

The mega-fraternal allure of Amy’s boobs notwithstanding, none seemed greatly distracted.

She won’t make a breakfast like Yvette.

Yvette’s Cafe is open from 8am-2pm Monday- Friday and 8am-4pm Saturdays, but is now closed until September 5.

TODAY’S column has been beset by technical problems. It did mean, however, that a rather unfortunate misprint was spotted at the fifth or sixth reading. Many of Yvette’s customers do, indeed, have short green wellies; whether they have short green willies, which was the original version, it is wholly impossible to say.

THE evening previously we’d dined at Brown’s, in Darlington. It hadn’t been the intention.

Plan A was to try Bannatyne’s Hotel, on the edge of the town centre, where (at least until the end of August) the early bird menu offers three courses for £12.95 – £16.95 Friday and Saturday – and is served until 10pm. Thus early birds become night owls.

It was 7.30pm and we’d not booked. There might be a table in an hour, said the pleasant barman. The early bird catches the wait.

Brown’s is 200 yards away in Grange Road, owned by Andrew Brown who, deservedly, made his name at the County, in Aycliffe Village.

Happy hour at Brown’s is precisely that, 5.30pm-6.30pm, which may explain why at 8pm there were no more than a dozen in.

Thereafter it’s not especially cheap, or maybe it was the unexpected sandbags outside that had turned away the flood. We ate on the upstairs balcony area, with a view of the kitchen.

“We can throw toffee papers on the people below,” said the Boss, clearly with childhood memories of some Welsh small-town fleapit.

Unusually, she ordered a small bottle of Prosecco. “The last time I drank this was in that brothel where we ate in Milan,” she said.

She does see life, that girl.

Andrew, a good and earnest bloke who believes in doing relatively simple things well, seems not to have enjoyed the instant impact that he had at Aycliffe. The County quickly became the Good Pub Guide’s Northumbria dining pub of the year; the latest venture may thus far be little known beyond Cockerton.

He was away. Paul O’Hara, formerly at the Bridge in Whorlton, near Barnard Castle, held the culinary fort. It’s a two-way view, of course, and we were clocked within seconds. The Boss thought appearances impressive.

“It wouldn’t make very good television, but he’s a picture of calm competence,” she said.

A sturdy, well-flavoured ham hock terrine came with piquant, home-made piccalilli and good, hot brioche. Competent, indeed. Grilled salmon Caesar salad proved a winning idea, too.

The waitress asked if she wanted anchovies (which, as everyone knows, are horrible) with it. The Boss said that of course she did.

“Most people don’t,” said the waitress, amiably.

“Then I’ll have everyone else’s,” said the Boss and appeared to get them, too.

She also enjoyed her fishcakes with parsley cream and buttered spinach and particularly good, lightly salted thin chips. I had a large chunk of pork shoulder, adorned with something that may have had a second cousin which was a Brillo pad.

It came with a well-judged mustard sauce, three little chipolata-type black pudding cubes – think again, boys, black pudding’s for getting the teeth into – a rather melancholy mash mound and, beneath the meat, some slivers of braised carrot.

Really it was brained carrot. Good carrots are delicious unadorned. Leave the poor things alone.

The waitress recommended the cinder toffee iced parfait with hot chocolate sauce. One pudding, two spoons, it was excellent – best ever of its kind.

With a bottle of beer, a small bottle of whatever it is they drink in Milanese brothels and one pudding, the bill reached £60. Which of these two meals represents the greater value for money is, of course, entirely a matter of taste.

MUCH rejoicing at Darlington Snooker Club, on the corner of Northgate and Corporation Road, named Camra’s North-East club of the year for the fifth time in six. The magnificent Boathouse at Wylam, next to the railway station, is the North-East pub of the year. It’s been there a few times before, an’ all.

LONG at the crossroads, gastronomically and otherwise, the Scotch Corner hotel is to gain a Fratelli’s Italian restaurant. There seem to be quite a few around the place. “More Italian than a Fiat 500,” says the sign amid the scaffolding.

We shall see.

…and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what’s black and hairy and surrounded by water.

A North Sea oil wig.