New Inn, Thrintoft

The funny thing is that so few write with recommendations, perhaps in the perverse belief that they don't want to spoil a good thing.

Two testimonials for the same place is rare indeed. It has happened, six months apart, for the New Inn at Thrintoft, near Northallerton.

"Apart from good food, their friendliness and hospitality is something to be treasured these days, " enthused Ray Kirby in August 2005.

"Nice meal, nice people, worth a visit, " wrote Lou Dale, down the road in Leeming Bar, a couple of weeks ago.

We went for Sunday lunch, younger son in tow, though the clarty back road to Thrintoft awoke memories only of his sleepless elder brother.

As a breast-fed baby he'd hardly rest at all, in danger of making his poor mother take to her bed had he not so relentlessly kept her out of it.

All that soothed him was the motion of the perambulator. It was just outside Thrintoft, 24 years ago, that a police car pulled alongside, its occupants alerted by a properly concerned villager. It was 6.15am, not the usual time to be pushing a baby along a country road. (A sack of taties would have been different. ) Early learning, the polliss eventually accepted the explanation.

We digress. The little one had a weekend off from his post-graduate journalism course, loving life but probably too full of beans. He's also having difficulty finding a work placement over Easter. "The tutor said he'd fixed it, but he was drunk at the time, " he said.

It never happened all those years ago on the embryonic journalism courses at Darlington Tech. The top prize was a £2 book token - the winner much too modest now to admit to it - the teachers probably Primitive Methodists, and Isaac Pitman a hewer at Murton Colliery. We digress once again.

Thrintoft's a microdot village north of the road from Northallerton to the A1. An Echo cuttings file marked "Thrintoft: general" - nothing specific there, then - embraces just four cuttings, one about finding ancient skeletons, if not in the cupboard then in a farmyard.

Alan and Joy Woods bought the 263year-old pub ten months ago - New brooms, as it were - after he'd spent 18 years as a manger for Bass.

A half-full bar would probably exceed the population of the half-hidden village. "I'm a glutton for challenges, " he says.

A warm welcome is fuelled by coal fires at either end, some comfortable armchairs and a smiling barmaid.

There are the local weekly papers but none of Sunday's.

A blackboard recalls that it was the day that Australian athlete Herb Elliott died, the day that George Harrison was born and that the Teletubbies made their debut on Russian television.

If all that equates to warmth, and it does, then the restaurant out the back is a little cooler. Neither generation liked the music nor the flimsy paper napkins and the bairn didn't think much of potato skins with cheese and bacon for £4.75. "A bit off a rip-off, " he supposed. On journalism courses, they now send them - expenses paid - to write restaurant reviews, too.

Roasts are around £7, Sunday alternatives including leek and mushroom bake, steal and Cajun salmon. The beef, he thought, was "beaut".

The tomato and coriander soup was thick, deep and full of flavour, the lamb with minted gravy went down well with a pint of London Pride (about which, like the Arsenal, the capital has every cause to be swollen headed. ) The Boss was most enthusiastic of all.

Not least about the "very well done" potato skins. The Cajun salmon was crisp and nicely spiced, the vegetables above average, the apple and blackcurrant crumble a home-made model of its kind.

It seemed a pity that the waitress went before we did, meaning that we'd to chase the bill, but something to write home about, anyway.

The New Inn, Thrintoft, near Northallerton (01609 777060. ) Open for meals lunchtime and evening, except Mondays. No problem for the disabled.