McCoys' Rooftop Restaurant, Baltic Arts Centre, Gateshead

A NUMBER which is by no means as cushy as most readers appear to suppose rose last week - rose, it might be said, in a glasssided lift - to the very zenith of personal challenge. Terrified, I lunched alone in the McCoys' Rooftop Restaurant at the Baltic Arts Centre in Gateshead.

The food is very good, the portions - as an artist might suppose - somewhat minimalist, the prices up to the roof and then through it. The single bottle of Theakston's beer was £4.95, the most expensive in history.

None of those is the problem. The problem is that it's not just the lift but the sixth-floor restaurant which is glasssided and that more than 18 inches off terra firma, I suddenly become glassjawed.

For head for heights, read depths of folly.

There's a cafe, a perfectly good, downto-earth Milburn's cafe, on the ground floor of the former flour mill on the south bank of the Tyne. Anyone else thus irredeemably and ineluctably afflicted would simply have taken root there.

For sixth floor read sixth sense; for sixth sense read insanity.

There's a sort of grab rail in the lift, to which I cling like a drowning man to a long-forgotten promise. It stops. I'm looking straight ahead, like a Sandhurst sprog with a stiff neck.

One small step, knees buckling, giddy heights. Neil Armstrong would have caught the next spaceship home and blow this for a game of soldiers.

The pony-tailed restaurant manager approaches, affably. Don't look down; nor does he. The terrible temptation, as perhaps torments all the worst sufferers, is to take the easy way out and thus jump to a final conclusion.

He offers a nice table by the window, views to all parties. I turn away, try to write the At Your Service column by way of lurching the mind elsewhere, find an order of service in the briefcase: Lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. . . .

Amen.

A waiter brings a complimentary appetiser. He seems to say it's fried anchovy and Belgian endive. Maybe it is, who knows? It's a warm April day and I'm in a cold December sweat.

Calm down, you silly sod.

The restaurant is long, modern, attractively set. And glassy. The chairs look a bit like the seats on Thornaby railway station, though not as badly vandalised.

The fixed price lunch menu offers two courses for £16.95, three for £19. 95. Side dishes like "baby" new potatoes, green beans or star anise carrots are £2.95.

Each.

The carte, lunch or evening, is £39.95 for three courses - a meal which might start with pressed spring lamb and baby duck terrine with roasted orange and red onion relish, lamb sweetbreads and English mustard and tarragon dressing followed by pan-fried spring salmon with baby plum tomato confit, black olive toasts, garlic puree, sauteed spring cabbage, green herb cream and roast garlic foam. Modern English cooking, transparently McCoys.

Other dishes offer parsley foam, basil foam, Parma ham and truffle foam. The brothers McCoy may have more foam than the average Tyne and Wear fire engine.

The table d'hote is less elaborate, lunchtime starters embracing ham hock terrine with beetroot chutney and petit salad, onion and cider soup with a cheese beignet and white crab with raw cauliflower salad and fried shallots which offers a wonderful fusion of flavours but wouldn't make much of a sandwich.

The beer's Old Peculier, inappropriately appropriate. Peculiar's not in it; bad look-out this. I'm writing the church column between courses, in the hands of the angels. The storey of my life.

Chargrilled medallions of beef arrive in a pepper sauce, with a bit of dauphinoise potato about the size of one and a half Lego bricks and some wilted spinach. The textures are terrific, the quality undeniable. Two little pots of beans and taties add another £5.90 to the bill.

There are three puddings - lemon tart with cardamom ice cream, pineapple and cherry polenta cake with cherry sorbet and a cheese board with a £4 supplement - but no time to eat them or drink coffee. The bill, with a ten per cent service charge, still tops £30.

The restaurant manager, told finally of the terrors, offers to take me back in the opaque walled staff lift.

I decline. What goes up must deflate.

When the lift returns to earth, I fall from it like a silly kid on a super-waltzer, tempted like the last Pope to kiss the ground on arrival. There's a view of a brick wall. Life's wonderful once more.

McCoys Rooftop Restaurant at Baltic, South Shore Road, Gateshead 0191-440 4949. Lunch seven days; closed Sunday evening. No problem for the disabled, no use for the spineless.

DARLINGTON town centre has its first new fish and chip shop for ages, Ocean Fayre - described by the publicists as "trendy", perhaps because it has planter pots - in Skinnergate. Late lunch, we looked in at 3.30 on Monday afternoon - fish and chips in one of those polystyrene cartons. The office is five minutes away. The kindest thing that may be said is that they don't travel.

AS promised last Tuesday, more information on the beer festival at Auckland Castle from Thursday to Saturday this week - noon to 11pm on all three days.

It's organised by Bishop Auckland and Spennymoor Round Table, will offer more than 40 real ales and "food from the castle chefs", hopes to raise £6,000 for local charities - especially the Great North Air Ambulance.

Table chairman Simon Gillespie, owner of the Grand Hotel in Bishop, would also welcome a call from other local organisations which feel they could benefit.

The festival's in a marquee, the throne room - a most splendid place - taken over by the bands. Prognosis play on Thursday night, The Force - "probably the North-East's top rock band" on Friday and Frankie's Cafe on Saturday.

Whether the Bishop of Durham is taking himself away to a monastic retreat for the weekend is sadly unknown. Admission to everyone else is £3.

THE younger bairn, shortly to be unleashed upon the unsuspecting world of journalism, joined us for dinner at the Fox Covert, near Yarm.

He'd read a letter in The Times claiming that food critics should visit a place at least twice before reviewing it and thought it a good idea, thus proving that he still has much to learn.

It was the night of Boro's UEFA Cup match against Steaua Bucharest - last four, first leg. Cleveland was semi-conscious, the pub much quieter than usual.

The food was OK, service slow. The kitchen staff may have been watching television, too. The Deuchars was in good form, the whole place non-smoking.

"Where we lead, Tony Blair follows, " says a slightly smug banner outside.

Though the blackboard menus looked like they'd been there a long time, they couldn't spell "potatoe" and "tomatoe".

The bairn, who has a politics degree and so knows about these things, reckons that American vice-president Dan Quayle was notorious for not being able to spell potato, either.

It recalled a 1960s song, possibly by Tom Paxton but clearly modelled on Len Shackleton, called The Ball of Spiro Agnew. It began "I'll sing of Spiro Agnew and all the things he's done", and ended right there.

What is it about US vice-presidents?

. . . and finally, the bairns wondered if we'd heard about the musician who spent all his time in bed.

He wrote sheet music.