Cuddy awful

IT may not be said that we drive aimlessly around the North-East on Eating Owt expeditions, because the aim without exception is to find a place about which unequivocally we can enthuse. It's just that sometimes the target seems to be moving, too, and about ten times as fast.

Last Wednesday we'd wondered about the Valeside in Cassop, a former colliery village a few miles east of Durham which (it's said) gets its name from Cats Op, Old English for the Vale of the Wild Cats.

The Valeside was shut. The Victoria, the pub opposite, had a very jolly mural on the gable end of the old Cassop Vale colliery banner. There were flowers everywhere.

Instead, we headed back to the Kicking Cuddy at Coxhoe - or, strictly, Park Hill - not half a mile off the Bowburn interchange of the A1. The Kicking Cuddy was florally resplendent, too. We asked the photographer to get some pretty pictures of it all, to balance the gruesome prose.

Once home to the shove ha'penny world championship, and when shove ha'penny boards were two-a-penny, the Cuddy's now run by Punch Taverns. The company was said a couple of years back to have spent £150,000 on its refurbishment.

There's no shove ha'penny board, though. The pool table coins it, instead.

Once the Clarence Villa, the pub apparently takes its name from the 19th Century donkey - or "cuddy" - races which were held nearby.

There's a bar with a large, flat-screen television and two lounge-cum-dining areas. All are served from a central area dominated by gilded beer fonts and by Boddington's, the self-styled cream of Manchester.

There were five other diners, including a party of three women teachers doubtless looking forward to going back to school. A dozen or so were in the bar. A solitary young lady, pleasant enough but occasionally overwhelmed, served as both barmaid and waitress. One other person worked the kitchen.

We ordered at 8pm, the Boss "pan fried" mackerel - you fry mackerel on an engine driver's shovel? - the column "hand- grated potato rosti" with crispy bacon and mushrooms.

Hand-grated? What other expectations, grate or otherwise, were we supposed to entertain?

The menu also talked of a "recurrant" jus with the lamb - I say, a recurrant jus with the lamb - but that was probably just a slip of the keyboard, like calling Boddington's the crime of Manchester.

At 8.30pm, by which time only the teachers were still dining, we overheard someone in the kitchen ask about the mackerel in the freezer.

"Is them them long ones?" asked the other voice, the affront to the English language - not to mention the culinary arts - so great that one of the teachers visibly squirmed, like she'd had a kick up the 3Rs.

We waited for the microwave. You could hear a pin drop.

The starters arrived at 8.50pm; the Boss thought the mackerel OK. The technical term for the potato rosti was vile, the specifics that it tasted like it had been cooked in elderly engine oil and then dragged for 25 miles behind the vehicle in question.

The bacon and mushrooms weren't bad, but together much too salty. It was a meal which left a nasty taste in the mouth.

The teachers were by now complaining about slow service, the Cuddy apparently anxious to emphasise the maxim about three being a crowd. What on earth would have happened had they been busy?

"It's all home-cooked," said the all-trades assistant, employing the greatest of all the catering industry's many weasel words. Where else is it supposed to be heated up?

Main courses arrived at 9.15pm. "The plates is boiling," said the all-trades assistant. The plates wasn't alone.

The Boss had followed with "home made" fish pie - not just home cooked, mind - thought it quite decent but that there were many more fish pies in the sea. The chips veered between soggy and boggy.

We had Cajun pork steak with saute potatoes, vegetables and lime and coriander creme fraiche. The characterless Cajun steak, consistency of a second-hand sandshoe, may have been dreamed up by someone who believed Cajun to be a village on the other side of the motorway, probably near Bowburn - either that or he imagined it to be cadgin' pork steak, the sort you greed from your fellow-diner.

The teachers had sent back their coffee. "Like dishwater," they said. The girl said it had come out of a machine, though we weren't certain if that meant it was home-cooked.

Treacle sponge, a solitary pudding, could probably have been renamed trickle sponge, so slight the evidence of its principal ingredient. It had been ordered at 9.30pm. "I'll see if we're still serving," said the young lady.

The bill came to £28, including drinks - almost certainly an underestimate, but by that time we were in too great a homeward hurry to argue. This, alas, was Cuddy hell.

IMMODESTLY described as a "wonderful dining experience" and "the finest restaurant in Darlington", Gastro opens in Gladstone Street this weekend. The launch party's on Thursday, the column as usual absent without leave. Gastronome from home? A report ere long.

FIRST time in 30-odd years, the Cafà Continental is serving in Crook. Then it was the place to be; it's entirely pleasant now, too.

Janet Aberdeen and Hazel Ross opened in June on the same site in Commercial Street, the Continental shelf clearly not having shifted very far. It's very much mainland Britain for all that - sandwiches, salads jacket potatoes - though a Cafà Continental breakfast, croissants and things, sits alongside the full English.

The day's soup (£1.95) was a hot and very tasty mixed bean and vegetable, which was followed - get this - by an all-day breakfast panini, with mozzarella cheese. It was good; a Janet Aberdeen flag day.

MENTION a couple of weeks back of Robinson's splendid little butcher's shop and cafà in Wingate, east Durham, prompts Arthur Pickering - webmaster-cum-piemaster - to declare their pies the best in the region.

"The steak and kidney are superb, mince close behind, ham and egg slice just as good and the pasties are asking to be queued up for.

"The jury's still out on the pork pies, which are maybe better cold, but as you know, us Hartlepool lads don't give pies a chance to cool down."

He's also irresistibly enthusiastic about the plate-sized, lattice-topped pork pies at Appleton's in Ripon, borne homeward in bags marked "For cooked meats and table dainties."

Dainty, says Arthur, they aint.

....and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what's brown, has lived in the sea and attacks mermaids.

Jack the Kipper, of course.