Blagraves House, Barnard Castle (From The Northern Echo)

The last supper

4:41pm Tuesday 27th September 2011 in Reviews By Mike Amos

AFTER 26 years, the final Eating Owt column. At odds with the widelyheld belief, it has been the hardest thing – and usually the least enjoyable – that I have done.

The philosopher who supposed that there was no such thing as a free dinner had clearly been a food critic, too. Babes and sucklings, the bairns – as then they were – long since put an innocently unerring finger upon the pulse of the problem: “Do we have to talk about this meal,” they poignantly echoed, “or can we just eat it?”

The requirement to write 1,200 words about it is not a good accompaniment to a meal. Much rather HP sauce, or possibly a pint of Strongarm.

The meal becomes more indigestible yet when the great majority, perhaps 90 per cent, are neither wonderfully good nor horrifically awful.

They are ordinary, that’s the great indictment, and never more ordinary than in much of the North-East of England.

They are middling, mediocre, grist to the mill, but who the hell wants to write for 47 weeks a year about porridge? Employ all those words and there are still 1,190 waiting to sign on.

It’s also why, almost every week, we’ve simply refused to entertain places which – within their own feeble aspirations – we expect to be no more than average and which would only add to the torrents of critical cobblers.

What on earth is the point in visiting a place without aspiration, which may well know its market, and then condemning it for accordingly setting out its stall? What’s the point of echoing the opinion of the Monday morning bus queue, of the lowest common denominator?

Nor should grist be synonymous with being mealy-mouthed. The column has had no truck with the ever-burgeoning battalions of public relations people, almost never accepted a free meal.

The skill that many readers have acquired is in reading between the lines. The column hasn’t been intended as an education, rather as an entertainment. Besides all that, I’m soft.

THERE are places, of course, which simply cannot escape honest rebuke, the criticism sometimes so excoriating that physical violence has been threatened, indeed promised.

“It is odd,” says the Boss. “how many people in the hospitality industry haven’t a hospitable bone in their bodies.”

On one occasion, perhaps 15 years and several incarnations ago, this involved the manager of the Scotch Corner Hotel following a particularly red-blooded review.

His subsequent rage centred upon summary decapitation – a heads-up as the hideous modern phrase would have it. Since we lived but a mile away, an interesting illustration of all that they say about not defecating in your own nest, is was perhaps fortunate that he thought better of it.

Some simply imposed a ban, as if ban were punishment. Others – a previous management at the then-quite awful Kicking Cuddy in Coxhoe comes to mind – orchestrated synchronised outrage.

The most frequent cause for complaint is that none seems to be in charge, or that if they are they should have been in bed with their teddy bears by eight o’clock and let the grown-ups take over. It has so often been like eating in a kindergarten.

What on earth happens to all those bright young kids turned out by the catering colleges?

Times are hard in the catering industry; it seems scant reason for so many almost suicidally to blast away their brains.

IT’S for those reasons that the great places stay so fresh and vivid in the memory. How we still mourn Andrea Savino who, in Shildon – of all the wonderful places – ran a restaurant of such amiable, atmospheric and idiosyncratic excellence that its memory will live for ever.

Still we recall, on a reader’s recommendation, pitching up a tea room in Whaw – top end of Arkengarthdale – and being bewitched by its fresh and simple excellence. Down dale a few miles, the Burgoyne Hotel, in Reeth, recently offered Britain’s best breakfast.

The Tees suggests a seemingly impenetrable gulf, far more top-class eating places – especially pubs – in North Yorkshire than in all of County Durham. Most of the guides wrote off Teesside long ago.

Oases in the Durham desert, we fondly recall the late Mike Boustread and his wife, Jenny, at The Stile in Willington, salute yet Ray Henry and Bill Thompson at the Fox and Hounds in Newfield, bow towards Chris Davy and his team – altogether more recognised – at the Rose and Crown in Romaldkirk.

Darlington has almost always been disappointing, Durham City more surprisingly so, a good Sunday lunch to be welcomed because there are so many damn awful ones. Gastro pubs, by and large, mutated into ghastly pubs as always we had supposed.

Indian restaurants have generally become more interesting, Italians more boring, Thai places feebly predictable and the surviving Chinese eating houses as dated as the Great Wall.

The region’s best Chinese, it seems to me, is still the Eastern Bamboo in Darlington, better than anything experienced in Chinatown, Newcastle.

The Bamboo has sent a Christmas card for the past 30-odd years; that may ensure another.

SHARON, of course, has been the most frequent dining companion, tables booked always in her maiden name. She is not just the designated driver, but the only one, has endured hours of debate about where we might next eat, has given up thousands of hours when a cheese sandwich might have seemed more appealing.

People all the time ask my favourite eating places. The answer, invariably, is “home”.

In earlier days we’d also quite regularly dine out with the Rev Nick Beddow, the late and lamented Voracious Vicar, a man to whom seconds thoughts were commonplace and who’d frequently welcome thirds.

For a while there was a Breakfast Club, at which the Rev Chris Wardale and his partner Malcolm McCourt made up a foursome, sporadic outings with Krimo Bouabda, who ran an encouragingly eponymous little place in Seaton Carew and who now has three restaurants as testament to his enterprise.

Others have made occasional appearances.

For some reason they never came back for more.

The lady of the house remained constant. She has provided incomparably wonderful company.

THE boys came, too, occasionally still do.

Goodness knows how the jokes started.

The one that most frequently comes to mind is that about the engine driver’s egg sandwich, perhaps the most subtle – all things being comparative – about what the French have for breakfast. Huit heures bix, of course.

SO it was that the dutiful duo headed, for the last column, to Blagraves House, on The Bank in Barnard Castle. It wasn’t trial and error. We’d been there several times, ever-enjoyed it, had decided months previously that, damn it all, we deserved it.

Blagraves is reckoned Barney’s oldest house, retains every whit of its character and its charm, has been run for 23 years by the admirable Ken Marley and his wife Elizabeth.

The downstairs reception room is almost always coal-fired, the restaurant upstairs seats just 26, black-clad waitresses shuttle cheerfully and expertly between the two.

As the evening progresses, however, the prime sofa by the fire may be bagged by a black cat called Sparky, said not to belong to Blagraves, but to the whole of The Bank.

Sparky has a bottom drawer in the antiques shop, a basket in the newsagent’s, a place by the fire at Blagraves. “He’s quite a character,” says Ken.

Table d’hote dinner is £24.95 – Tuesday to Friday, the carte available on those days and on Saturday. The menu wording may seem almost prosaic – sauted breast of chicken with white wine and marjoram; pan-fried pork loin with caramelised shallots and cider – but the cooking and the ingredients are rhapsodic. Allendale Brewery real ales both on draught and in bottle, too.

Like the ingredients, the clientele seems largely locally sourced too. A farmer on the next table is discussing cockroaches – “big buggers, mind.” Tellingly, they are regulars.

Chicken and thyme soup, pork tenderloin with cider and coarse grain mustard sauce, caramel parfait with hazelnut brittle provided what journalistically might be supposed the last supper. The food’s outstanding, the sum of the parts better still.

We toasted 26 years, thought it a funny but a fascinating journey, truly went out in style.