Eating Owt column

It's a multi-purpose word, ranging from a short form of hashish to meat chopped into small pieces for cooking.

The Oxford English also adds "a mixture of mangled and incongruous fragments", "a term of obloquy applied to someone who makes a mess of his work", "a trade name for waste paper of the lowest quality" and, among others, hash-up and hash sign - you know, the portcullis #, making its keyboard debut hereabouts.

The most up to date of a wide definition of dictionaries on these shelves also includes "Apply algorithm to character string", but that's computer-speak and needn't concern decent folk and Shildon lads.

Hash's latest variation opened recently in Coniscliffe Road, Darlington, a couple of doors down from the rightly celebrated No. 22. This is number 18, and if it does nine-elevenths as well, they'll make millions.

Intending to dine alone, the only truly working lunch, we bumped en route into Mr Kenneth Lavery, former Darlington police superintendent, general manager of Darlington Football Club and one or two other things. Again out of retirement, he now works for the Great North Air Ambulance.

"There's only so many times you can dig your garden," said Ken. "What really worried me was when I started to enjoy daytime television. I knew it was time to go back to work."

Perhaps inevitably, the conversation turned also to Mr George Reynolds, with whom Ken had been professionally acquainted. Ken thought that GR had abandoned the comb-over look, and thus Britain's best known hair clips.

George losing his grips? This could be an exclusive.

Hash is what's probably called a caf-bar: wooden floored, skylit, attractively furnished, fairly inexpensive. A hash house in the US is "a cheap eating house or boarding house". Might this be a clue?

The menu's modern, the customers of all ages. Though chic enough, it still has sauce bottles in the middle of the table and, bless it, "home made fish finger sarnie" served with rocket and lemon. The beer's John Smith's Smooth, about which no more need be said and words fail, anyway.

Ken had had to fly, as Great North Air Ambulance men must. We ordered a pork burger with caramelised apple, salad and fries (£6.95) followed by a very pleasant lemon cheesecake.

Other hot dishes, around £5-£7, included tuna and spring onion potato cakes, beef stew, chicken club sandwiches and sundry Thai green curries. There was also a range of sandwiches, goats' cheese tart and flat bread paninis.

Had there been sausages, which there weren't, it could have been bangers and Hash.

The burger was fine, the salad insignificant, the chips the fried potato equivalent of John Smith's Smooth.

It's run by Phil and James Robson and their mum Chris who had a Hash sandwich bar in Yarm, now operated by others. What's in the name?

"Dunno," said Phil. "Someone just came up with it out of the blue and we liked it. I don't think anyone knows, really." It seemed to be going quite well. That's that hash settled, anyway.

l Hash, Coniscliffe Road, Darlington. Food served Tuesday to Thursday from 11.30am-2.30pm and from 4-7pm, Friday from 11.30am-2.30pm and from 4.30-6pm, and Saturday from 11.30am-4pm. No problem for the disabled, no smoking.

EGGLESTONE is a prosperous looking village in Teesdale, the stub of the smelt mill chimney on the village green a reminder of the days when it had nowt, or when it had to work long and hard for what little bit it had.

There are two pubs, the Three Tuns facing the green and, high on the road to Weardale, the Moorcock.

Last time we tried to eat at the Moorcock, different owners and different decade, we'd got as far as the bread bun, thought better of the enterprise and fled. A reader had recently recommended its renaissance.

Though there's a restaurant out the back, Sunday lunch was served in the coal fired lounge, and thus became a rather cheek by jowl affair.

On the next table, about 18 inches away, they were discussing (as they have every right to do) horse mites, and cat neutering and sheep scab. The Boss was on the lamb.

A beer font had pump clips for both Black Sheep bitter and Heineken lager. A bottle of Lea and Perrins stood sentry in front of it. Were they selling Worcester sauce by the pint, an' all?

We arrived at 12.45pm, folk already leaving. There are many in the North-East for whom Sunday lunch isn't so much an occasion as a ritual, something to be undertaken between the News of the World and going back to bed. To that end, service was helpfully speedy.

The only two starters, £3.75, were huge bowls of French onion or cream of mushroom soup. The Boss thought the French onion sound and the "Teesdale" lamb a local lamb made good.

The alternative soup was curious, tasted of something indefinable, not really magic mushroom at all. The steak and ale pie was OK, the ample vegetables, no doubt, the way they like them up there, the Yorkshire pudding...

We'd got past the bread bun, anyway.

LYNDA White from Billingham sends the Christmas Day menu from the Raby Arms in Hart Village, near Hartlepool - "a lovely pub with friendly staff, good food and a total non-smoking policy." The six course festive spread looks pretty good, too, though Lynda's a bit worried about the sorbet - "to cleanse the pallet". Fork lifting at its best.

IN July we took Sunday lunch in the Treehouse Restaurant at the Alnwick Garden, where a bottle of beer was £4.50. "If the great garden speaks of freedom," we wrote, "then the Treehouse Restaurant is Botany Bay."

Like the building, the cooking was wooden. The soup was tepid and tasteless, the chicken weary, the dressing dreary, the croutons beyond crediting.

Undaunted, a public relations firm acting for the Alnwick Garden Trust has now sent a gushing press release. The Treehouse Restaurant, it says, is "a unique dining experience."

So it is.

...and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call an ant with five pairs of eyes.

Ant-ten-eye, of course.

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