DUKE Street is just north of Darlington town centre, home chiefly to estate agents and to "For sale" signs, though the link may at best be semi-detached.

There are also a couple of charity shops, a hair cutting academy and a place called Urban Chaos. Whatever it is, it perfectly sums up what's happening on Darlington's roads just now.

For the past month or so, there's also been a new restaurant called Oven, in premises formerly occupied by the Victim Support group but now attractively refurbished with bare floors, modern prints and banquette seating down one side.

Victim Support ran out of funding, which possibly they wouldn't have done had they been the poor, aggrieved aggressors. Who helps the helpers?

An elderly lady sat at the next table. "You've saved me a stamp," she said, enthusiastic and unsolicited. "I was going to write to tell you how good it is."

We lunched with Bernard Nixon, a colleague on the Arngrove Northern League management committee, who's also an architect in Darlington and a prominent Methodist in Middlesbrough. They'd just had a service led by puppeteers, called Hands Up For God.

His phone rang the moment he sat down. It was someone on about ceiling tiles. "Not just now," said Bernard. Had he not been a good Methodist, he'd have said he was in a meeting.

The restaurant's owned by Tarek Thoma, an Egyptian whom we'd encountered previously at the Manor House Hotel in West Auckland. On the first occasion, however, it was a bit like the miracle of the Roman centurion's daughter who (it will be recalled) was healed by spiritual remote control.

In England since 1990, Tarek was head chef at the Manor when we'd visited in 1999 with less than great expectations. It was wonderful, meal of the year, best of all the spicy fish soup so deep and so rich in sea life that Hans and Lottie Hass could gainfully have been employed for a month in getting to the bottom of it.

It had also been Tarek's night off, his second-in-command clearly well taught. "If I'd known it was going to be that good, I'd have looked forward to it," the Boss observed, memorably, at the time.

Thereafter he was head chef at the Dun Cow in Sedgefield when George Bush and a few friends looked by. Seeking a place of his own, he got into the Oven if not out of the heat.

The name owes everything (he says) to the lintel carving above every door in Duke Street. It's heliotropic, sunny. He wanted something like it, beginning with a capital 'O'.

One or two teething problems remained last Thursday lunchtime - they hadn't a licence; they have now - but Mark 1 was very promising.

Though early promotions spoke of "French and English" cuisine, it's essentially, honestly, muscularly Anglo-Saxon. "Giving it a bit of welly," said Tarek, as doubtless they do in Cairo.

The column's lunch, for example, comprised mushroom and celery soup, "English" faggots with mashed potato - baked, they could have been the duchess of Duke Street - and carefully cooked vegetables followed by "brioche" and butter pudding.

The soup was a little tepid, celery past its sell-by, the faggots (£8.95) were a robust and full flavoured example of simple things done very well, and in their own rich and potent gravy.

The bread and butter pudding - brioche, if you must - could have done without all the spun sugar atop, but again epitomised simple, unfussy flavouring and honest ingredients.

Bernard forewent a starter - the lunchtime and early evening menu needs more choice at the top - but greatly enjoyed his freshly cooked pan fried chicken fillet with red wine, mushrooms and bacon sauce (£10.95).

Lunch may simply have been a salad of chargrilled and marinated lemon, lime and garlic chicken or of Spanish frittata, both £5.95. Other choices included mussel bowl and hot baguette (£7.95) or perhaps a "classic" French cassoulet with confit of duck, Toulouse sausage and butter beans (£9.95).

Dinner's more expensive, main courses around £15, lots of fresh fish. Oven's going to be pretty hot stuff: cooking, as they say, on gas.

* Oven restaurant, 30 Duke Street, Darlington (01325) 466668. Open Tuesday-Saturday lunchtime and Monday-Saturday evening. No problem for the disabled. Christmas lunch and dinner menus available.

A FEW doors up Duke Street there's a new fish and chip shop tediously called The Right Plaice. Can't anyone come up with something better?

A letter in the window announces that they've failed to make further progress in the fish and chip shop of the year contest - "I know you will be disappointed" - a notice inside asks customers to bring in their used plastic carriers. "Protecting the environment for our children."

The children, or at least the college kids, overflow it like a common room. Most can only afford chips, poor kids, but hang around without problems to make a convivial meal of it.

Fish and chips were £4.15: crisp, fresh, golden, abundant and really very good indeed. Thank goodness there's nothing in a name.

LAST week's column on the Station House Tea Rooms at Thorpe Thewles, north of Stockton, noted that George V occasionally alighted at the station en route to a sojourn with the Londonderrys at Wynyard Hall.

Martin Birtle in Billingham guesses that it was more likely Edward VII - a man who so clearly enjoyed the Londonderry air that, says Martin, the court circular was issued from there around 1902.

It was the first time since 1745, when Charles I moved his court to Oxford, that it had happened, he says.

Stockton Council's website carries a splendid 1903 picture of Eddie boy at Wynyard with sundry lords and ladies, though we can find no mention anywhere of the court circular.

What goes around comes around, can anyone add credibility to the Thewles errand?

STAGED by the Wear Valley branch of the Campaign for Real Ale, Bishop Auckland beer festival runs from tomorrow (6pm) to Saturday (11pm) at the Masonic Hall in Victoria Street, near Kingsway.

The theme appears to be the old, old story - everything from Old Father Thames (3.4 per cent abv) to Old Tom at 8.5.

Since Amos Ale is said also to be making an ageless appearance, we have scanned the beer list for the most likely disguise under which it might be listed.

Old Buffer, Old Growler and Old Tosspot are presently the favourites.

LUNCH at the Red Square caf in Bishop Auckland, run by delightful Russian expat Victoria Dudden and her son Sasha. The windows are as steamy as a blue movie, the music machine plays Something in the Air, that 1969 number one by Thunderclap Newman about the revolution being here.

If ever there was a one-hit wonder it was old Thunderclap. Thereafter he never did better than 46.

Food's altogether English, roasts £2.90, good Yorkshire puddings. A little lad of four or five chases round like a misguided missile. "'E does your bloody 'ead in," says his young mum, to no-one in particular.

The kid's called Ivan. Honest; terrible.

...and finally back to the cooking at Oven - and the bairns wondered if we knew what kind of musical instrument the ancient Britons played.

The Anglo-Saxophone.

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