Malcolm Warne sucks in a stomach fed on festive fare and brings in the New Year at the Walworth Castle Hotel

THIS review is always the most difficult of the year – the one between Christmas and New Year when the last thing anybody wants to do is eat.

Pity the poor food critic who, having done just the same as everybody else and has eaten his own bodyweight in festive food – food designed to be a treat in an long-forgotten era when everyday scran was generally unappetising and Christmas was a rare opportunity to eat things we couldn’t afford during the rest of the year.

Of course, today we eat like its Christmas 52 weeks of the year and when the holiday arrives we end up consuming industrial quantities of rich, fatty, sweet stuff that makes us feel akin to, and move like, force-fed fois gras ducks just prior to slaughter.

It must be difficult for hotels and restaurants too. Having dealt with the demands of the festive season, they tend to be drawing breath before the last hurrah of the old year.

Choosing a destination is tricky too and we probably got it wrong in choosing a hotel in a medieval castle. Castles are not generally the places for effete, miniscule-portion, fine dining designed to wake-up jaded palates. It is more likely you will be presented with the sort of robust fare Henry VIII would have got stuck into with gusto.

The menu at Walworth Castle, near Darlington, may not be quite fit for a dysfunctional, megalomaniac king with extraordinary appetites, but it was more than enough for the pair of us post Christmas excess. Never has so much food been ordered by so few – and not eaten.

We had booked a table in Hansards restaurant, but finding it completely empty thought it best to eat in the Farmers Bar which served broadly the same dishes, but also had a wood burner and some other diners. Designed to look like a pub, the Farmers was certainly cosy. Clues to its true nature lay in the entrance to “The Dungeon” and the thickness of the walls.

Ordering at the bar from a menu which could be best described as agricultural in tone, I chose what looked like one of the lighter options available from a starter selection which included black pudding with crushed new potatoes and poached egg (£6.25), and Yorkshire pudding served with sausage and mustard (£4.95).

My smoked cheese, spinach and prawn cake (£5.25) was an ice hockey puck-sized melange of moist cheesiness let down by a suspiciously dark coloured batter overcoat. The homemade tartare sauce helped lift it out of its weighty gloom. The minted pea puree tasted as if it had been made days ago.

Sylvia had skipped a starter in anticipation of her main course choice, but we thought we would order some bread, olives and alioli (£3.95) as a precaution against the unlikely onset of hunger before it arrived.

This was a mistake in that it was really a sharing platter made up of three large fresh bread rolls, a small orchard of olives plus some sun-dried tomatoes. The rather thin, but nevertheless very garlicky alioli failed to turn up initially, but did so with some prompting.

Sylvia had saved herself for her nostalgic main choice – a mixed grill (£15.95) with all the trimmings. She didn’t stand a chance for this was the Full Monty 1960s/1970s classic – rump steak, breast of chicken, gammon steak, two sausages, onion rings, tomato, mushrooms, fried egg and chips.

She gave it her best shot but only the steak, the gammon and the sausage merited much attention. The chicken was dry, the egg overcooked, the tomato and mushroom pretty tasteless. The onion rings and the rather flabby chips appeared to have been cooked in that same suspiciously dark batter and were barely touched.

My fish and chips (£10.95) were disappointing too. The batter wasn’t cooked through in places and the fish simply wasn’t very fresh. The chips were limp and lifeless.

For some bizarre reason I took a chance on a dessert and was amply rewarded with a superb Bakewell pudding and custard (£4.95). The nicely crisp pastry base underpinned the traditional layers of almond frangipane and raspberry jam which was then topped off with a dollop of ice cream. The vanilla pod custard was artfully smeared around the pudding with the addition of very good (for December) strawberries. Not a morsel remained which was quite something given what I had previously consumed.

The bill was £44.05 and would have been stonkingly good value had we had anything like normal appetites and the food had been prepared with a little more care. It included two soft drinks. Apart from the faux pas over the alioli, we were looked after well enough. Tony, the barman-cum-waiter was certainly cheery enough and was spot-on in his recommendation of the Bakewell pudding.

Best Western Walworth Castle Hotel

Walworth, Darlington, County Durham DL2 2LY

Tel: 01325 485470 Web: bw-walworthcastle.co.uk

Open: noon-2pm-5-9.30pm

Limited vegetarian options. Disabled access.

Food quality: 3/5

Service: 3/5

Surroundings: 3/5

Value: 3/5