Dad’s barmy

ANOTHER birthday. Presents included a 1978 Dad’s Army annual – “world authorised” – and rather a lot of Broons books. Serious stuff. The elder bairn joined us for dinner, marvelling not just that someone so old could still be alive but that his dad could still hit his mouth with a fork, or at least not miss it by much.

We ate at the Kings Arms in Sandhutton, on the A167 a few miles south of Northallerton. Yorkshire has any number of Huttons – Buscel and Cranswick, Magna and Parva – and that’s not to mention Sir Leonard.

We’d rung just an hour before leaving home, prudent because we got the evening’s last table, overflowing into what’s called the tap room.

The restaurant had a party, and not just a party but a party with balloons and poppers. What local authority function rooms call a gala dinner. Though I’d neither balloons nor party poppers, someone at work did buy a pork pie with a candle on the top.

The Kings, a new entry in the 2010 Good Pub Guide, is run by Raymond Boynton and his son, Alexander, both of whom cook. Raymond had for many years owned the acclaimed Nags Head at nearby Pickhill with his brother, Edward, who remains there.

The tap room has a glorious woodburning stove, three or four hand pumps, a framed bill from 1964 when a three-course lunch was six shillings and, on the wall, an evocative picture of Sandhutton Home Guard.

Some of them, you imagine, really were the Jones, Pike and Wilson of their village – probably the Mainwaring, too – but how did so small a place have so many men to take arms?

The table had four chairs, and a little holder with about 20 beer mats.

So had the other three or four tables.

Wondering what on earth they could be for, we concluded that the Kings may have abandoned darts and dominoes in favour of the ancient and remarkably dextrous game of beer mat flipping.

If they haven’t, they should. The could just call it the Flipping League, a world first. Think of the publicity.

Myself, I never got above two. Twenty may be excessive.

From 5.30pm to 7pm (“prompt”, it says) there’s a £5 early bird menu, five choices which included pork and stilton omelette and chips, rare breed pork sausages with cheesy mash and red wine gravy and salmon, cod and prawn fishcakes with sweet chilli sauce and vegetables.

They looked substantial.

Starters and puddings are displayed on blackboards in the restaurant; meat and fish for the mains are displayed in a chill cabinet inviting inspection, an interesting exercise.

I began with French black pudding with onion marmalade and pea puree, a more successful combination than it might sound though the French still can’t make black pudding like the bloody English do. The other two enjoyed scallops with a creamy, garlic-rich sauce.

The bairn had particularly liked the look of the beef fillet (£17), his mum had a monster fish cake (£10) which greatly reminded her of the Nags Head and I had the duck with a very tasty hoisin sauce. I’ve no idea what the now-ubiquitous hoisin sauce is meant to contain, but this was the sort where you used fingers to wipe up the remainder.

We’d asked for a selection of vegetables – old-fashioned chips, potatoes, carrots, broccoli, all well cooked and efficiently served and accompanied by a couple of pints of White Boar from the nearby Hambleton Brewery.

Puddings are £4.95 and very good – a ginger and orange cheesecake with lots of rasps on top, a tangy lemon tart and, for the bairn, something home made and convoluted that it’s quite impossible to remember.

One of only two problems was that the lad sat between us and the fire.

Great man that he is, he is not a good conductor of heat.

The other was that, when we fell to recalling Arsenal’s title-clinching win at Liverpool at the end of May 1989, I not only couldn’t recall the team but thought that one of them might have been the late Alan Ball.

Immediately, incredulously, the lad was texting his brother. Birthday or not, his filial message may be paraphrased in two words: Dad’s barmy.

■ The Kings Arms, Sandhutton, near Thirsk, 01845-587887. Open noon to midnight, but no food Sunday evenings.

HIS whereabouts pondered in last week’s column, the esteemed Andrew Brown may be on the verge of a comeback.

A former Roux scholarship winner, he put the County in Aycliffe Village on the gastronomic map, winning umpteen awards before selling a couple of years back.

If all goes to plan – “which it never seems to,” he laments – he now hopes to buy the Treasure Inn, a Chinese restaurant in Grange Road, Darlington, reopening before Christmas as Brown’s Café and Grill.

Open all day, it’ll embrace everything from breakfast to home baking, from “interesting” salads to what he describes as slow-cooked comfort dishes.

The prices, says Andrew, will reflect the current economic climate.

“How,” he muses, “can I fail?”

BILLINGHAM Catholic Club is said in the 2010 Good Beer Guide to be Teesside’s bestkept secret. It also boasted the most ingeniously named beer in memory, brewed to celebrate someone’s wedding and called Nupti-ale.

It’s friendly, immaculate, welcoming to visitors, though membership is just £6 for three years. Out the back there’s a big garden and a gazebo.

Though the Pope is conspicuous in absence, there’s a picture of Father Marron who founded the former Catholic school as a gentlemen’s club in 1958, of Catholic football teams – left food forward – and of first communions.

Five or six hand pumps included Copper Dragon and a couple from North-East micros. Around 9.30pm, that great Friday night tradition, the Salvation Army man came in with his magazines. Ecumenical and excellent.

THE North-West Yorkshire CAMRA branch’s eighth beer festival takes places at the market hall in Richmond from October 16 to 18 – more than 30 real ales and ciders to be supped and with live music on Friday and Saturday evenings. “Real ale sales are growing when national beer and lager is generally falling,”

says branch chairman Vince Rutland.

“We’re bucking the trend.”

WHAT proper journalists probably call a briefing, we had lunch on the house at the Black Bull at Moulton, near Scotch Corner, the ever-welcoming Jim Daly still behind the bar after 36 years.

The Bull’s been in the Good Pub Guide even longer, still thought in the 2010 edition to be a “civilised, enjoyable dining pub”.

The old Bull may be in danger of being neutered, nonetheless, fewer dining than we’ve seen for a long time. Before the year turns, new owners plan once again to take it by the horns. The best part of £2m is being spent on a scheme that will include 29 French cottage-style apartments, a shop that will also serve the small village and a refurbishment of bar and restaurants. After all these years, there may even be real ale.

The Pullman dining car will remain, a platform planned in front of it, though the real Moulton station was inexplicably three miles away in North Cowton – on the Darlington to Richmond line. Someone may even know why.

The re-design’s the work of Malcolm Tempest, the man behind the award-winning Forbidden Corner, near Middleham. Bull eyed, there’ll doubtless be more later.

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