Life of Pie

The first will involve the ritual evisceration, preferably with a ceremonial strimmer, of anyone convicted of playing music in a residential garden to the annoyance of the neighbours; the second will relegate Manchester United to the Wythenshawe Church and Friendly League fourth division (if division five is found no longer to exist).

The third will concern itself with the statutory definition of a pie. A pie will have to be both encased and embraced by pastry, the shorter the more enduring, and will be filled to within a quarter of an inch - insert centimetres to taste - of the lid.

The pastry will be required to be an integral part of the pie, a blood relation and not a second cousin by misconceived marriage; "puff" pastry and other effeminate arrivistes will be illegal under the Fraud Act of Nineteen Hundred and Long Gone and "steak and ale" pie will be breathalysed in an attempt to discern so much as a whiff of the barmaid's apron.

Penalties will be severe, and are likely to include hard labour in a flour mill.

We address these matters after an evening meal at The Honest Lawyer at Croxdale, on the A167 between Durham and Spennymoor and long previously known as the Bridge Hotel.

In June 2000, however, the place was so badly flooded - a lot of water under the Bridge - that it had to close. Around £2.5m has been spent on its restoration - hotel and "gastro pub" they claim - by the company which also owns the Manor House in West Auckland and the Centurion on Newcastle railway station.

Postdiluvially, it re-opened late last year, the "designer" motel rooms with heart shaped door numbers. They seemed chiefly to be lonely hearts when we were there, the representative body on the road again.

The name is curious, though a jolly series of legalistic prints adorning the walls - "Out of court settlement", "Barrister's request for legal fees" and so forth - prompts the thought that they might have bought the paintings and then thought of a name.

The print entitled "Legal cock-up", it might be added, had been confined to the gents'; for reasons which perhaps need little explanation.

The gents' was also where the baby changing facilities were. Something to do with the Equal Opportunities Act, presumably.

The menu is also scattered with feeble judicial puns and, at the bottom, something headed "Legal stuff" which talks about approximate cooked weights and accepts no responsibility for susceptible folk taking badly through accidental nut contamination.

Seating is very comfortable, decor a bit austere, service young, inexperienced and willing. We were particularly taken by a young lass with a bit of Su Pollard about her, who said she was the receptionist but waited at table, anyway.

John Smith's Smooth being the only available beer, we ordered a bottle of Newcastle Brown. Soon it may have to be called something else, of course; Dunston Staiths Brown Ale hasn't the same bouquet.

The inexpensive menu had steaks, burgers, a section called The Italian Job and other things of a predictable nature. Nothing remotely special about the specials board, either.

The Boss wanted to begin with the spinach, mushroom and mozzarella tartlets which had been unavailable the day previously and (upon checking out the back) were found to be no more greatly in evidence. Our black pudding, bacon and onion salad was most and perfectly OK.

She passed after the false starter, enjoyed as a main course the spicy bean burger, thought the chips "rubbish", the onion rings passable and the bits of salad inoffensive.

The beef and ale (for so it said) lay expiring at the bottom of a dish that might have doubled as a bird bath. On top of it, as improbably balanced as a patio set atop Everest, sat something flaccid, flaky and Falstaffian that may have been pastry but - by virtue of being separately cooked - certainly wasn't pie crust.

If that were sad, the mash was altogether worse, sitting sullenly like it had been forced to come in on its day off. In truth the potato was so sad you could have wept for it, the vegetables only a little less lugubrious.

The Boss finished with fresh fruit salad, fresh in parts, we with an undersized portion of "banana and pecan pud" which may consider itself a very long way down the pecan order.

A fourth early day motion, when the old order changes, will seek to define the term "gastro pub".

While "gastro" means nothing more than "to do with stomach", a gastro pub is now taken to mean a place which majors on food, offers dishes which are innovative and imaginative and which is prepared to go the extra mile - A167 or elsewhere - in order to achieve culinary excellence.

Did the Honest Lawyer meet any of these requirements last Wednesday evening? The column rests its case.

CRUSTY'S caf and take-away, Northgate, Darlington: Friday 9.30am. Six assistants vie for space behind the counter, the sizzling symphony of the full English breakfast an aromatic all-day accompaniment.

Some are off on workplace deliveries, the caf's telephone number like an identity disc on the back of their shirts, presumably lest they become disorientated.

The breakfast is first rate, £3.25 including coffee and toast, the service rise and shine cheerful, the atmosphere relaxed.

A young assistant on the road with seven all-day breakfasts asks where they're for. "The doctor's," says her gaffer. Who says a fry-up can damage your health?

STANHOPE the night before that: home-made biscuits with the Women's Institute, fish and chips at the little place behind the town hall, couple of pints of Jennings' Cumberland ale at the Grey Bull down the west end - "a fine house with a long held reputation for good ale," says the 2004 Good Beer Guide. So it proved.

Even the ale wasn't as good as the fish and chips, however - especially, unusually, the chips. They were firm, freshly cooked, piping hot, abundant and full of flavour. Well worth remembering.

THE Good Beer Guide a couple of years earlier had lauded the Countryman at Bolam - "a treat for lovers of good food and good beer". The praise was entirely justified.

The pub closed, nonetheless. Bolam's a dot of a place a mile off the A68 above West Auckland; the problem was what Charles Forte meant about location, location and whatever the third thing was.

Now, courageously, it's re-opened - no less well kept, still with several real ales but (shall we say) with one or two wrinkles to iron out in the kitchen.

Mr Gordon Hampton, Black Countryman himself, thought the black pudding in pepper sauce "magnificent" but only managed a couple of mouthfuls of his chicken and mushroom pie.

We began with "nachos melt", the cheese melted at approximately the same time as the last European ice cap, thereafter forming into a crust which one of Wimpey's windy picks might have been hard pushed to penetrate.

We ordered steak and kidney pudding. There was steak and kidney but no pudding and the "pie" would have puff pastry. "You can have a dumpling on top," they said.

When smaller and still dafter, our elder son got his leg caught between concrete crush barriers at Rotherham United's football ground.

"Eeeh, that's a rart dumpling thing to do," said the jolly South Yorkshire policeman called to his aid, and so it was. As for the every day story of Countryman folk, we wish them a very happy ending.

....and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what's green and holds up stage coaches.

Dick gherkin, of course.

Published: 11/05/2004