Eating Owt

It's £27. Each. Plus £3.95 for coffee and sweeties. Each.

Assiduous marketeers that they are, the hotel probably wouldn't welcome being billed as the North-East's most expensive Sunday lunch. It almost certainly is for all that and, the emollient, undoubtedly one of the finest.

On the last occasion, we appeared to be the only diners, the staff so attentive, or so bored, that they even laid on a guided tour. This time it appeared that the old mansion's history was to be repeated.

Had a bellman gone before, biblically intoning "Unclean"? Was it an exclusion zone for Shildon lads? Was there something that best friends hadn't mentioned?

Others quickly arrived, however, followed eventually by a wedding party with all the panoply - piper, vintage Bentley, stretch limousine - now customarily extended to such occasions.

The procession ended with a couple of Harbour Taxis. Uncle Joe and Auntie Gert.

It all begins in the lounge - Sunday papers, swanky magazines, more literature from Tom's Companies which owns the hall, the Fisherman's Lodge in Jesmond Dene and several other upmarket places.

Tom's Companies, says the egregious doggerel, are also an attitude; the hall is an unpretentious mix of this and that and gentler era; the food - most atrophied of all the cliches - is to die for.

What, one wedding and a funeral?

Seaham's in east Durham, Sunderland visible to the north. Computer tycoon Tom Maxfield had spotted the former home of the Londonderries and love nest of Lord Byron from the air, decided it would make a great hotel, bought it.

Lest pedants protest, we have decided after much consideration that Tom's Companies is singular, as indeed they are.

Guided tourists no longer, we weren't even shown to the dining room, merely pointed in that direction. It was the only flaw from an impeccable service team in which friendliness and formality fused.

The charming head waiter, French probably, had been down on his hunkers - Geordie, probably - to explain what a 'nage' might be. One of his people brought the food, a second served it, a third stood, also.

It is possible to suppose that at Seaham Hall "waiting" is a real job. It is to be hoped that they pay real money.

The decor is probably what's called minimalist, what the literature calls contemporary without explaining contemporary with what. No portraits of Londonderry heirs line the walls, just the occasional piece of modern art work which may have been knocked up by the reception class at Dawdon primary one wet Wednesday afternoon.

The incongruous note is from the music, the thumpety-thump sort favoured by baseball capped bravados who drive elderly Ford Escorts with the windows wound down. Since they willingly turned it down, why on earth turn it up?

The food, while not of the fill-your-boots variety - as probably they would have said down Vane Tempest pit - is terrifically good and imaginatively executed, nonetheless.

In the lounge there'd been a little freebie plate of olives, cheese straws and cream cheese and garlic croutons, followed in the restaurant - one of the restaurants - by a carrot and ginger concoction with coconut foam.

It was one of those things you didn't know whether to eat, drink or photograph for Good Food magazine, but as a signal of the kitchen's creativity, it was unmistakable.

Thus the lobster bisque seemed both surprisingly bland and learner pool shallow, no matter how dressed up with spinach leaves and a sea scallop. It came with, or was preceded by, little bread rolls with black pudding baked in the middle.

We thought of asking for a bottle of brown sauce, remembered what they say about showing browtings up.

The Boss had begun with asparagus, gnocchi and artichokes - it worked, wonderfully - followed by the nage of salmon and halibut with saffron and a white sauce.

"Nage" is something to do with swimming. It was: buoyant as a beach ball, deep ended with flavour; memorable.

We'd moved on to duck confit cassoulet, perfectly crisp and with particularly good chorizo sausage. Clever stuff.

She finished with a wondrously light raspberry souffle with raspberry syrup and (guess what) raspberries, we with a chocolate fondant cake with lots of little cherries soaked in something seriously alcoholic.

Probably the crucial question in all this is whether we'd have paid £82 for lunch, with a glass of wine and a few soft drinks, had the company not (unknowingly, at that point) been picking up the tab.

Probably the greatest recommendation, if only once every four years, is that the unequivocal answer is yes.

IT is to be a tale of two Sunday lunches, the second - altogether less expensive - at the Cross Keys in Eppleby. Huge main course, fresh and full of flavour, a fiver.

Eppleby's roughly between Darlington and Richmond, little more than a quarter of an hour from either. A couple of miles away, the Zetland Hunt kennels seemed uncannily quiet, a sign in a nearby hedge back urging "Fight prejudice, fight the ban."

It was the dog which no longer barked in the night.

Up the road, a newish sign indicated that Mansfield was a mile and three quarters distant. It's possible they meant Manfield; Mansfield was last heard of in Nottinghamshire.

The pub's friendly, even jolly. A monkey holds the menus, little aphorisms line the walls, the doors, even the cistern in the gents. An apple pie without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze, it said near where we sat. The sixth Baron Byron probably wished he'd thought of it first.

We were also seated next to a learned book case, full of improving volumes like Harmsworth's Universal Dictionary. Winston Churchill's Guide to the English Speaking Peoples and the New Caxton Encyclopaedia. Thus it was possible to learn that the phrase "Women and children first" was originally used on the Birkenhead - all women and children saved, 485 men lost - and to range a rich gamut of information from elephantitis (which sounds nasty) to extreme unction (which may not necessarily follow.)

With extreme unction, it was explained, the priestly practice is to anoint the eyes, ears and nostrils, hands and feet and, in the case of men only, the kidneys. More devout readers may be able to explain why male kidneys should be thus favoured.

We'd arrived on spec. Pint of keg Magnet, seated within two minutes, served within ten. No freebie frippery here, no great phalanx of waiting staff, not even any starters.

Large amounts of well cooked meat - pork, lamb or beef - arrived with side dishes of cauliflower cheese, mushy peas, potatoes, green beans, carrots and probably one or two other things as well. The Boss was a bit disappointed with the Yorkshire puddings; the rest was excellent.

Though the main courses had summarily been announced at the bar, the single, willing, pleasant waitress arrived with a board the size of a netty door on which the puddings were listed. She recommended the crunchy raspberry brulee; The Boss was very glad she had. We had a home made Mississippi mud pie. Suitably clarty. Puddings are £3.50.

Tina McGarrell, who rents the Fountain Restaurant, moved a couple of months ago from the nearby Brownlow Arms at Caldwell. Business is picking up nicely, she says. On Sabbath evidence, it deserves to.

* The restaurant at the Cross Keys is open Wednesday to Saturday evenings and Sunday lunchtime.

...so finally, the bairns wondered if we knew why Mummy Owl was so worried about her son.

Because he no longer seemed to give a hoot.

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