Total non-starter

IN THE beginning was the word, and since the word often accompanies the At Your Service column, Sunday lunch frequently follows. We went to Starters, in Yarm High Street.

Yarm’s become the posh end of Teesside, favoured by footballers, what Gosforth was to Newcastle before being superseded in the affections of the affluent by Darras Hall, Ponteland, and one or two other places where the talk’s of all fur coats.

The odd thing about Yarm is that all the pubs are on one side of the street – the George and Dragon where the inaugural meeting of the Stockton and Darlington Railway was held, the Ketton Ox where a psychic night’s foreseen – and almost all the restaurants and cafes across the road. On this occasion, the pubs had the sunny side of the street.

There are also a considerable number of health-related places, medispas, acupuncturists, podiatrists, osteopaths.

The footballer’s wives may be getting on a bit.

Starters claims to be a “totally unique” concept – you can be fairly unique? – offering a wide range of starter-size dishes plus optional puddings.

That’s odd, too, because we reviewed somewhere very similar last May.

Starters and Puds is near the Theatre Royal in Newcastle. Dave Burrow, the Darlington-based owner, is a very much better restaurateur than he is a domino player.

The Yarm version had several flatscreen televisions, happily meutered – a new word with which I’m quietly quite pleased. On the first we faced, the caption said “Leaks enquiry”.

It’s a sign of increasing decrepitude that I wondered, however momentarily, if someone had been caught peeing in the trench again.

The analogy may not be too remote.

We ordered a brown ale and a sparkling water. “Not a problem,”

said the waiter, a form of words he was many times to repeat. It was as if he’d overcome the Herculean labour of carrying a plate from kitchen to customer, but might struggle if asked to recite the seventimes table.

The place is large, alcoves to the side, free standing tables in the middle.

Each table had a little tulip, prompting The Boss to observe that “tulip” was from the same root as “turban”. Amazingly, she was proved right again.

The clientele was largely youthful, though there was an Arthur Askey lookalike in braces and straw boater who may have fallen off the end of Blackpool pier, circa 1948.

The menu offers around 32 starters, served singly or in combinations, mostly £6-£7. They include Teesside’s favourite late night lineup, the ubiquitous parmo.

Others might have been belly pork ribs, chef’s jambalaya – if the jambalaya is the chef’s, who on earth makes all the other stuff? – and something called chicken Edward VII, which looked a bit like chicken Kiev.

They do say that the old philanderer had a girl in every port. Perhaps Kiev was simply one of them.

I’d begun with a crab, spring onion and potato (of course) rosti, with scallops, king prawns and sweet chilli. There’s rosti and there’s kizzened; this was kizzened, rosti to within an inch of its life.

Worse followed, in the small form of “French” black pudding with “creamy” mash and a brandy and peppercorn sauce. The mash wasn’t so much creamy as rheumy, the three titchy bits of black pudding would together hardly have formed a mouthful.

If haggis is the great chieftain of the pudding race, as Mr Robert Burns supposed, then this was the Little Plum.

The Boss fared a little better, beginning with king prawns in tempura batter – “prawns fine, batter all right” – then onto “uninspiring”

fishcakes with what she considered a pleasant little salad.

We ordered an additional bowl of “chilli” chips, £3.95 and perhaps the greatest culinary disaster since King Alfred burned the cakes. The gloopy sauce resembled that curry stuff which came out of a tin 50 years ago, the chips may once or twice have made it to the surface but were now wholly beyond resuss.

“Very, very peculiar,” said The Boss, though she had for some time been quivering on the brink of querulousness, Starters for tension.

I finished with a white chocolate bombe, or bomb as the case may have been. They spelt it two ways and both of them a damp squib. A threecourse Sunday lunch was still £18.

None of it really worked, neither the antithesis of good stuff in little bundles, nor the formulaic manner in which it was served.

Perhaps it was just a bad day, but for Starters it may be back to the drawing board.

THE stretch of Northgate, Darlington, between the ring road and North Road station now has 21 fast food joints, cafes and restaurants. Most are pizza places, or have Eastern orientation. Dent’s, the latest, is actually a traditional fish shop – cod and chips £3.95, £2.95 between 2-5pm. Thus armed, I headed to the sun-blessed park out the back, ate lunch and wrote half a column.

All seemed right with the world.

ENVIRONMENTALLY friendly, the multi-award winning Crown at Manfield, near Darlington, stages a “Save green miles beer festival”

from May 1-4. Everything’s locally sourced.

The new Richmond Brewery will be represented, as will Wylam and High House from Northumberland, Wensleydale, York and others. Food from round the doors, too.

Friday evening music from Stag, Saturday from the Smoking Spitfires, Playback on Sunday and from 1pm on bank holiday Monday, Northallerton Silver Band and a bring-your-own barbecue.

KENNY Atkinson, another who believes in local sourcing, has won the North-East heat of the BBC’s Great British Menu competition. Kenny, last year appointed executive head chef at the Seaham Hall Hotel, gets to cook a banquet for returning British armed forces if he wins the national title.

LAST week’s column mused upon the origins of the song Nick-Nack Paddywack Give the Dog a Bone and despite an email from Phil Atkinson in Canada may be little wiser. It was around in the 19th Century, anyway, originally about someone called Jack Jintle. Then there was the dear old Nicky Nack – now the Dalesside Arms – at Croxdale, near Durham, but that’s another and perhaps equally apocryphal story.

…and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what you call a guard with 100 legs.

A sentrypede, of course.

Frank and the nun-pareil

FRANK O’Neill, one of that rare breed of pub landlord of whom it could be said that he transformed the place simply by being behind the bar, has died.

The most amiable and hospitable of Irishmen, Frank – a former haulage contractor – had the Foresters Arms at Coatham Mundeville, near Darlington, between 1992-2005. We’d mentioned him just two months ago – “a gregarious sort who usually gave the impression of having won the Irish lottery.”

Like Kate Umpleby, the present incumbent, Frank has also encountered the pub’s resident ghost, a wandering nun who’d proved entirely friendly. When folk commented on the magnificent array of hanging baskets around the Foresters’ door, Frank insisted that it was the ghost who watered them. Thus it seemed a little obtuse for the Echo to photograph him at work with the sprinkler.

There was an Irish parrot, almost inevitably called Seamus, and five Bengali eagle owls, who may not have had names at all but got poor Frank into a fearful flap with the law.

He’d built a lovely little aviary out the back – hens, ducks, geese, all sorts. Someone complained about the eagle owls and he was charged with illegally possessing an endangered species for commercial gain.

Hauled before the beak, as it were, he made five appearances before the CPS threw out the case.

The column’s visits were usually of the flying sort, too – an immaculately kept pint of Magnet, roaring fire, good grub when necessary. Of Frank it could truthfully be said that he kept a good house.

His funeral is at 9am tomorrow at Sacred Heart RC church, Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough.