THOUGH readers are doubtless familiar with the 14th chapter of the Gospel according to St Luke - the Parable of the Rich Man's Feast, and similar self-improvement lessons - we may perhaps be permitted to reproduce verse ten:

"But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he who bade thee cometh he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher; then thou shalt have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee."

Thus it seemed at Cathedrals - opened last month at a cost of £3.5m in Durham's former police station - except that we went unannounced.

It was early doors Saturday, about 6.30pm. On the top floor is something called a Fine Dine restaurant, three courses £20.95; on the first a bistro - three-course set menu, £12.95.

We tentatively took a seat in the ground floor bar, sausage and mash £3.95, and - as ever outfacing experience - confidently awaited higher things.

Cathedrals lies almost beneath the walls of Durham jail, the police station almost derelict until September 1999 when Richard Lazenby's adventurous eye fell upon it and thought it a fair cop shop nonetheless.

Twenty-odd years ago Richard and his wife Rosemary had a little pub called The Wishing Well at Great Langton, north of Northallerton. When things got a bit quiet, as they did, he made mustard as well.

The mustard proved appetising - hot stuff puns may be inserted to taste - so he sold the pub, opened a small factory at Maunby, a few miles south, and finally started Mr Lazenby's food factory on Teesside, sausages a speciality.

Mr Lazenby's is now sold, and with it the rights to his trading name. Cathedrals opened four weeks ago, after much haggling over the licence.

"The rumours were that we were going to open up a bloody great boozer with thousands of kids marauding and going bananas," says Richard.

The rumours were wrong, and it must clearly be understood that the black-tied blokes by the gate aren't bouncers, or even doormen, but car park attendants. If the car park attendants seem a bit burly, work in pairs and have two-way radios, it's simply because of the difficulty in finding a space these days.

It should also be said that, from the car park attendants inwards, the front of house staff at Cathedrals are the most pleasant, confident and accomplished it has been our recent pleasure to encounter, their smiles so universally wide that they might have increased the minimum wage to ten guineas.

We were on the bottom rung, nonetheless. The bar had cakes and pastries at one end, cases of plump cigars at the other and four or five hand pumps in the middle.

There was also a child who screamed and screamed like Violet Elizabeth Bott, so incessantly that she should not only have been incarcerated in the cells across the way, but kept there at Her Majesty's pleasure in the hope that Her Majesty might live happily ever after, or at least for the next 350 years.

Richard says he's looking at the policy regarding children. The re-appraisal is to be applauded.

Would it be possible, we asked the waitress - upwardly mobility not having been suggested - to ascend at least as far as the bistro? An agreeable antipodean appeared, said that the higher echelons were already fully occupied - 12 chefs had been working the Saturday night previously, Mr and Mrs Lazenby furiously washing up downstairs - and offered the bar menu instead.

There were lots of pizzas for around a fiver, sandwiches for £3.50, a short specials board which included roast fennel salad. The Boss thought it "wonderful."

Cathedrals makes almost everything it sells, opened a coffee shop and "pantry" this week and begins brewing any day, fermenting tanks already gleaming by the door. Whatever they were selling in the meantime only underlined the wisdom of going it alone.

It was limpid, dead-on-arrival beer, only redeemed - in a left-handed sort of way - by the staff's insistence on filling the glass to the brim. They were topping, too.

With it we had well-flavoured tomato and basil soup (£1.95) and pie and chips which, whatever the stratum of society, were a feast fit for a king. Made in-house, it was a voluminous and an in-the-pink pork pie, cost £3.50 and arrived with little bowls of pickled onions and chutney and with what are probably known as chip shop chips.

The pork pie pure and simple has almost totally disappeared from bar tops, partly because of environmental health ogres and partly through the foolish fad - absurdly thought "ethnic" - for desecrating it with mushy peas. The two go about as well together as sausages and custard.

Since the bar menu offered no puddings, we tried two speciality coffees - banana bonanza and hazelnut cream, £2.50 apiece. The cups were hotter than the contents; neither was our cup of tea.

There seemed much promise, nonetheless, and as the evening advanced, Durham's finest taking their seats on high. It was possible to turn to chapter 14, verse 11 - "for whosever exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted" - and to know that one day, maybe one day, it might happen. But the pie and chips were ambrosial already.

WITHIN the walls of Durham jail, Her Majesty's Crown Court sits, too. After last week's passing reference to best bacon, a posterior on the press bench rings to recommend the judicial bacon butties - "definitely the best in the North-East, loved by judge and defendants alike." A recent price rise to £1 has been accompanied by a notice blaming foot-and-mouth disease. Mitigating circumstances, your Honour.

WE also dropped into the Wishing Well at Great Langton, a tiny place on the road from Northallerton to Scorton - if this is Great Langton, whatever happened to its little sister? - with a village notice board proclaiming: "Vote Dixon for chair." It is to be hoped they are comfortable with the new role.

The pub may hardly have changed since Mr Lazenby began stirring the pot: cask Magnet and Black Sheep, inexpensive sandwiches, an attractive little garden and a poster that says: "Grow dope: plant a man."

The Boss, who 20 years ago had reported the closure of the village school, thought it hilarious.

Conversation turned largely on a couple of fishermen who'd been rescued from a sand bank in the nearby Swale - fire engines, ambulance, the lot. It may have been the most exciting thing to happen in Great Langton since Rchard Lazenby had the mustard seed of an idea, and went on to make a few million.

THE Grey Horse in Sherburn Terrace, Consett - lovely pub, lovely people - holds its annual beer festival from Saturday to Monday this weekend. The 32 real ales, 16 at any time, will this year be augmented ("by request") by a selection of 15 whiskies with noses variously described as vanilla ice cream, sweet toffee, lavender, crunchy green apples, smoky, spicy, oily and bubblegum. One man's drink, and all that, we shall probably stick to the beer.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call a midnight feast.

A bed spread, of course.

Published: Tuesday, August 21, 2001