The Brasserie, Yarm

“Food and service excellent, Black Sheep perfect, chips the size of girders.”

If not quite an apology, it may thus be necessary before proceeding to offer Mr Emmerson a note of caution. It is impossible to agree.

The most instant turn-off is that every table has its own television screen, set somehow into a mirror – about the size of those on which we watched the Coronation, they’re no doubt more technologically advanced.

Mutered, admittedly – I’m thinking of copyrighting that word – they’re idiotic, for all that.

“It’s like putting a rattle on top of a baby’s pram,” said The Boss. “Because it’s there you feel that you have to play with it.”

The barmaid in a fairly empty restaurant advised us to take a seat and that they’d be round for the drinks order. Maybe the one advantage of a telly on each table is that you know exactly what time it is.

It said 19.01 when we sat down, though it might as well have said 1066, so historically inept what followed.

Two or three times the young lady walked blindly past; the barman almost literally counted the napkins.

At 19.15, shortly after war should have been declared, we got up and left. No one said goodnight, no one said sorry. As my old mother used to say, no one said kiss… well, you probably know what my old mother used to say, anyway.

At 19.21 we landed at The Brasserie, almost directly across the road. Locals will know that The Brasserie is barely two minutes walk away, even with a gammy knee. They will also know how hard it is to cross the High Street – if ever a town needed a bypass, it’s Yarm – even in the early evening.

Once a cloth mill, formerly a clothes shop and much else, The Brasserie has been a restaurant for 12 years. Yarm, south bank of the Tees, has abundant competition.

The High Street was voted best in Britain by BBC viewers, the profile is seriously middle class. Many are said to be footballers and, presumably, footballers’ wives.

Men in nancy running kit seemed everywhere to be pounding the pavement. The lady supposed, a little fancifully, that it might be the end of the world and that they were fleeing (as the Good Book has it) from the wrath to come, the only problem that they were all fleeing in different directions.

The Brasserie was as clued-up as the other place had been ignorant, which is to say that they’d ignored us. It was comfortable and convivial; there were no televisions and no mirrors.

We liked it at once.

That there was a real ale pump – Jet from the Wainstones Brewery at Stokesley – was a bonus.

Jet was appropriately black, so close to stout as to be positively obese. It was very good.

The theme’s French, or at least continental, the clientele frequently Scottish – not Glaswegian HGV drivers parked up for the night at Eaglescliffe but, quite likely, some of the footballers now familiar around Yarm.

When manager of Middlesbrough last summer, Mr Gordon Strachan is said to have set in motion the biggest cross-border invasion since that terrible howking at Nevilles Cross. Mr Strachan has since departed; Boro keep on losing, nonetheless.

A chap (Scottish) at the next table was asked if he were comfortable. “Awesome,” he said. He was asked if his starter were okay. “Awesome,”

he said. All these years and I don’t even speak the language.

There’s an early bird menu, 5.30-7.30pm, something a bit more expensive thereafter. I ate from the former, the lady – “comfort food” – from the latter. “You can tell I’m not feeling very bright, they’re the cheapest things on the menu,” she added.

She began with a softly poached egg with spinach and bits of chorizo sausage and potato salad in a dish like a plunge bath – “lovely,” she thought – followed by roast vegetable crepes with baby mozzarella and tomato herb sauce.

Other main courses, mostly £15.95, might have been slow-roast belly pork with spiced red cabbage, grain mustard mash and scrumpy cider sauce or pan fried chunk of cod with mixed greens, crispy leeks, saute potatoes and salsa verdi.

The music was okay, choice and volume suitable to the evening. She thought it was Nora Jones, of whom I’d never heard, but who may be the daugther of someone called Ricky Sitar.

From the early bird, the chicken liver parfait with good crisp toast, chutney and salad was generous and genuine; a splendid starter, a well constructed lamb burger – “more like a cricket ball,” the lady supposed – came with salad and “hand-cut skinny chips”.

We harped on about the hand-jive last week.

Even if they were hand-cut, what possible difference does it make?

We were served by Mijanou Downing – “My parents wanted something different, people just call me Mij, anyway” – who proved amiable and accomplished. Slim, too, though probably not hand cut.

A single pudding – spicy jerk banana with white chocolate ice cream (£4.95) showed a happy inclination towards experimentation, altogether different from the other jerk stuff that tastes like a coal hewer’s cummerbund.

The bill, with drinks, was just £40. We’d both thoroughly enjoyed an unexpected evening in a place that went out of its way to be hospitable.

Thanks Edward, we got there in the end.

􀁧 The Brasserie, 16 High Street, Yarm. Tel.

01642-890020. Open Tuesday-Sunday lunch, Monday-Saturday evening. About 20 minutes from Darlington.

AFTER a dawn ride on the postbus up Wensleydale, a high-quality breakfast with Mr Raye Wilkinson at Penley’s – “coffee shop and bistro” – in Leyburn. Everything’s itemised, so that two scrambled eggs on toast is billed as three items (£2.65). Two scrambled eggs, muscular sausages, black pudding and fried bread to die – well, wonderfully decadent fried bread – was £5. Good coffee, too.

Looking again at the receipt, they seem to have omitted some crisp and tasty bacon. We’ll pay next time.

SAID to date back to 1239, Blackfriars restaurant in Newcastle has reopened its medieval banquet hall – where Edward III once held court – after a £150,000 restoration. Communal dining, candle-lit evenings, four courses with mead around £35.

ASWIFT supper at the Church Mouse, on the A167 near Chester-le-Street, prompted two questions – the first why it now seems impossible for waiting staff to finish a sentence without the word “there”.

“There you are there” rather put the tin hat on it.

The second, not least because we were with the Reverend Leo Osborn, president-designate of the Methodist Conference, concerned the proverbial penury of the ecclesiastical rodent.

The Oxford English dates the phrase to at least 1731, John Betjeman – as usual – best summed it: Christmas and Easter may be feasts For congregations and for priests, And so may Whitsun. All the same They do not fill my meagre frame….

Scampi £6.95. Tomato and vegetable suet pudding £8.50. Pint of beer £3.25. There.

FOR probably about the tenth time, the everexcellent Boathouse at Wylam, next to river and railway station, is CAMRA’s Northumberland pub of the year. That and the Bacchus in Newcastle now go forward to the North-East regional final.

WE enthused a few weeks about the quirky but greatly appealing George and Dragon at Boldron, between Barnard Castle and the A66.Terry Simpson and his wife, Joy, went on the back of the recommendation and write in grateful agreement.

“A little gem,” says Terry, “that we in turn will strongly be recommending to friends.”

…and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew why the raisin went out with the prune. Because she couldn’t find a date.