As they say with other addictions, and since one or two readers have complained, we are trying - one day at a time - to stop listening to other people's dinner table conversations in restaurants.

It makes sense. For one thing they're usually either boring, cliched or made unilaterally into a mobile telephone and for another, someone soon is going to get cross.

This period of denial must nonetheless be gainsayed by the chap ten feet away at The Shambles in Staindrop.

He was talking about his Highland terriers, and about the Keith Prowse ticket agency in London which boasted - probably still does - "If you want the best seats, we've got them."

Because they always bagged the best seats at home, this chap's dogs were called Keith and Prowse, too. It suggested an interesting avenue - pet names; what do you call yours? Staindrop's between Darlington and Barnard Castle. The Shambles, a Grade II listed building, has been a restaurant for at least 15 years - once called Wackford Squeers, in trembling deference to the stick happy headmaster with literary connections thereabouts.

For the past five months it's been run by the Iannotti family, styled a "Slow food restaurant" and offering "Italian and continental cuisine."

Though there's little of the pasta and pizza which permeates similarly flagged establishments, there's a distinct taste of Italy, nonetheless.

Shambles, as readers will know, meant "meat market" long before some etymological assassin brought chaos from order and took it to be a pig's ear instead.

Staindrop's, more prosaically, is in Central Buildings, a Shambles of a pretty high if fairly expensive order - a fine mess, as the oxymoronic Oliver Hardy might have said.

The decor is middle England, the long room warmed at the end by a highly effective log effect gas fire which - as dear old George Reynolds likes to say of his sawdust brickettes - didn't half chuck out some heat.

For Wackford Squeers, read Tom Brown's Schooldays.

Next to the fireplace there's a bookshelf offering Jane Grigson, Secrets of the Great French Chefs and a volume devoted to 101 things to do with a napkin, all of them decorous.

The menu's supplemented by a daily changing specials board that's strong on fish - lobster £21.95, surf and turf £23.95, black bream £16.95. Chicken tarragon, cheapest by some way, was £10.95.

There was minestrone soup, too - can an Italian restaurant be without it? - but the specials board also offered stratocelle soup, which basically comprised chicken stock, eggs and peppers and had hitherto been unheard of.

For all this column knows, therefore, it could have been the finest stratocelle soup ever to cross the French Alps on the back of an elephant. Whilst pleasant enough, however, it wasn't a dish to make you want to learn the recipe in three languages nor to wonder which came first, the chicken stock or the egg.

The sirloin with a green pepper sauce was served precisely and perfectly as requested, The Boss's black bream prepared clinically at table by a dextrous waiter called Mario.

"If I could do this with peoples," said the amiable Mario, "I be rich man."

The Boss considered the operation a success, the bream fresh, vivid and generally terrific. She liked Mario, too. It came with mussels, a richly flavoured and tomato-based sauce and - on both sides - vegetables that, while proficient, were perfunctory. A beautifully moist rum baba followed. "Like Mama used to make," said Mario - she didn't, though she did a lovely rice pudding on Mondays. The Boss's fruit salad was one of those that could neither be faulted nor particularly extolled.

We'd started with complimentary olives on bruschetta, ended with complimentary liqueurs. The bill with a couple of drinks reached £61.

Ten feet away, the chap with the theatrical terriers was talking of "customer interface". It was time for the meeting of Eavesdroppers' Anonymous.

THE Pig and Whistle, probably Redcar's best known pub, has seamlessly relocated - pot pigs, Injun chief, the lot.

Bulldozed out of West Dyke Road by a supermarket deal, it's re-opened 200 yards away in the former Citizens' Advice Bureau in Station Road. Both lay-out, disconcertingly, and customers seem identical.

Keg Magnet's £1.33 a pint. It's doubtful, however, if we shall return. The chap who, unchecked, effed and blinded with every other word - record, five in succession - is doubtless of infinitely greater value to the porcine economy than this column is, but if they have the grace of the sty then they must be left to wallow in it.

As the fat comic in the flying hat has it, if easily offended, please stay away.

A LAST minute change of plan means that the Old Farmhouse - between Darlington and Teesside Airport - won't yet be closing for major refurbishment, as the column said last week. Work has been delayed until the new year - and though Vintage Inns like animal names, it'll stay the Old Farmhouse thereafter.

OF the first three and a half million adjectives which might reasonably be applied to our old friend Mr Dennis Wearmouth, none would be "hip". Dennis is to hip what Vanessa Feltz is to blue jeans; Dennis chills out only when watching Shildon play football and then thaws, over a pint and a post-mortem, in the clubhouse.

Felicitously early retired, he is given to little tours of the region's more conservative hostelries. It was to much surprise, therefore, that enthusiastically he should recommend Trent House - a self-styled "soul bar" - in Newcastle.

Dennis Wearmouth, sold on a soul bar? It's at the top of Leazes Lane, near the universities and the Royal Victoria, back of the football ground, couple of minutes north of the Haymarket. "The mother of all bars" it says outside, above a lengthy song of self-praise that includes "up to date gossip, laughs and bar trickery."

On the tables, there's more. "The loveliest little minx of a bar that you could wish for....a completely separate entity within the city's drinking culture....a soul bar and a living thing."

Dennis is quite right, nonetheless. At least at lunchtime, not least amid the hurly-burly homogenising of the city centre, it's a most welcome little oasis. They sell Curly-Wurlies, too.

The music's held at mezzo-forte - you know, bearable - the real ale (Theakston's and McEwan's) is £1.95, the young company convivial, the soul food excellent value.

Baguettes, all sorts of fillings, arrive for £2 with salad, coleslaw and a bottle of French dressing; toasties and lesser sandwiches are yet cheaper.

Football and fashion cover the walls. There's even a poster for The Sound of Music - to me, Dennis and Julie Andrews, what heart and soul's all about.

....and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what's yellow and goes putt, putt, putt? An outboard banana, of course.

Published: Tuesday, October 2, 2001