Crying over the Onion

9:19am Tuesday 1st April 2008

The column spends a very unhappy Happy Hour' at The Purple Onion in Middlesbrough

IT'S 5.45pm in Middlesbrough town centre. Rain falls from a cold-steel sky, youths ride undersized bicycles along the pavement without regard for the more pedestrian users, a skimpily dressed young lady stumbles along on hyperbole heels.

You got it; it's happy hour.

It's cliched, dammit, and cliches aren't my stereotype. It's a platitude portrait of a ten-bob town, but if ever there were a more lugubrious way of spending happy hour than in the Purple Onion then it is impossible to imagine it without reference to the Order for Burial at Sea.

In truth, there's probably more merriment in the mess room of the municipal mortuary and, in some cases, better food, too.

We were off to the theatre, a touring production about Lola Montez, the 19th Century femme fatale whose improbable education was at Mr Rea's Genteel School in Monkwearmouth. Much more of that alluring lady on Thursday.

The Purple Onion's on Corporation Road, just along from the lachrymose law courts. The restaurant's website describes Corporation Road as an "enviable location" but, then again, it also describes the chefs as "finely trained" and the food as "mouthwatering".

Once it was run by the celebrated McCoy family, their idiosyncrasies still evident in the decidedly different decor.

A Darlington and Stockton Times review three years ago - when the menu appeared to be almost exactly the same - approvingly thought the interior a cross between a "French fin de siecle bordello and a Turkish souk".

Clearly those D&S Times boys got out more than I'd imagined.

There wasn't another soul in. The cheery waiter invited us to take any table we wished, though none could escape the music to slash your wrists by.

Downstairs there's a cellar bar, too. The emphasis may, in fairness, be on a rather younger clientele.

There's a "Happy hour" menu - pasta, spaghetti and stuff, £4.95 including a soft drink - and a medium length menu on which, the waiter warned, some things weren't available.

Five minutes later he returned with a litany of missing ingredients, which included curry, halibut, mussels, salmon and lamb. Clearly they were having an off day.

I ordered the pork medallions and a Coke. "It may be the only thing we have,"

said the waiter, but it wasn't because the "Coke" was a small glass of something identified on the bill as "post-mix" - £1.30 - and, it transpired, they hadn't any pork either.

By this time, arraigned according to taste, they'd have had little chance of a glowing review had the food been ambrosia itself. Almost inevitably, it wasn't.

I'd ordered the "terrine wrapped in dry cured bacon served with a Cumberland sauce". It was from a terrine machine, the bacon so miraculously cured that it had taken up its bed and walked. The sauce was chilli-flavoured.

It was followed - best to quote the menu - by "chicken breast stuffed with Greenland prawns, sunblush tomatoes and thyme cream". It's curious how places like to talk up Greenland prawns because "Greenland" seems simply to be a synonym for "mingy", or possibly "tasteless".

The chicken hadn't been stuffed with anything; the prawns lay about in various stages of rigor mortis. Two bits of skin appeared to represent the tomatoes.

The cheek of it would have made Lola Montez blush. The sauce? Another thyme, maybe.

The pint of Stygian Smoothflow with which it was all reluctantly accompanied cost £3.30.

Having foregone a starter in protest at the absence of mussels, The Boss had a spinach cake from the vegetarian section which - let us again be fair - she thought perfectly enjoyable.

The identical bowls of vegetables were identikit, too. They'd advertised chips as an alternative. The waiter never even asked. We skipped pudding.

By 7pm, the gloom encircling, ours was still the only occupied table. The music machine played What a Way to Spend an Evening though We've Gotta Get Out of This Place - The Animals, was it not? - might have been more appropriate.

Outside, the rain had finally stopped - the Purple Onion enough to bring tears to your eyes, nonetheless.

■ Purple Onion, Corporation Road, Middlesbrough, 01642- 222250. Open Tuesday Saturday 12-2pm and 5-10pm.

Happy hour 5-7pm; what larks.

WRONG again, to suggest in last week's column that the upcoming beer festival at the Vintage Vehicle Museum (April 12-13) was Shildon's first.

Mark Harrington in Darlington not only recalls a festival at the Civic Hall as far back as 1984 but can name the ales - Big Lamp bitter, Chiltern Beechwood bitter, Chudley's bitter, Fuller's London Pride, Hook Norton Bitter, Tisbury Local Bitter and Victoria Breweries Albert Special.

In those days, says Mark, Shildon had at least three pubs selling real ale. Now it has one. "So much," he concludes, "for progress."

THE Darlington branch of the University of the Third Age (hugely successful organisation; still a naff name) meets in the municipally owned Arts Centre. Asked once again to hold forth - and these daytime talks are going to have to be curtailed, you just can't get work in edgeways - I first grabbed a light lunch there.

The lounge is known as The Lounge - it probably took a council committee to come up with that one - offering baked potatoes, wraps, sandwiches, a couple of salads and snacks.

Almost everyone dining was female, even the occupant of the high chair. It was further evidence of the imbalance of the sexes.

The vegetable and lentil soup (£2.95) was excellent - rich, deep, aromatic and so attractively presented that you could have painted its picture. The chicken Caesar salad, conversely, was overwhelmed by an acrid mayonnaise that left a bitter taste for much of the afternoon.

On another bitter-cold day, an ice cream van waited improbably outside.

Either he'd had a puncture or it was surrealism's last stand.

It was supposed to be a local history talk, but they'd got the wrong feller. We talked instead about the new structure out the front which is possibly a bike rack but, much more likely, a modern sculpture.

The U3A thought it a water feature, perhaps switched off because it was raining. Almost unanimously, they considered it hideous.

Next morning an email arrived, saying thanks very much but asking not in the future to stand in front of the window.

Apparently it makes life impossible for lip readers. As probably they say in the University of the Third Age, you learn something every day.

AS last week's column recorded, the last time we were in the Arts Centre was for Darlington CAMRA's beer festival.

The column also observed that Ian Jackson, formerly with the Wear Valley Brewery in Bishop Auckland, had taken over as head brewer at Captain Cook in Stokesley - but not that Captain Cook's Easter Island had been voted best in festival and its Slipway third.

Ian, understandably, is a bit pleased.

The brewery's at the back of the White Swan, recently named Cleveland CAMRA's 2008 pub of the year and now again serving their formerly esteemed ploughman's lunches from Wednesday to Saturday.

Wear Valley, happily, continues in production and has apparently been using bread yeast instead of brewers' yeast. A recent ale was called Feed the Ducks - bread on the water, anyway.

and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew the name of the man who claps at Christmas.

Santaplause. Of course.

Editor's Choice