Top nosh

NEW Year’s Day, first foot barely forward, and already Rhian Cradock has an award. Northumbrian Dining Pub of the year 2011, it says so on top of the menu.

It also says that Cradock is the 2010 “Food champion”, that the Feathers was named “Best pub” in the 2010 Northern Hospitality awards and that it has an RSPCA “Good business” award, too – ethical and cruelty-free food.

Probably the menu would say a great deal else – the Feathers has been richly awarded – were it not for the need to squeeze some food on there as well.

Were a footnote to read that young Cradock had also been named Beard of the Year, or that his petunias had won best in show, or that his wife, Helen, had once been Miss Hedley on the Hill, none of it would in the least be surprising.

That they are a success story is self-evident – they also won the Good Pub Guide’s award for Northumbria, Durham and Northumberland, in 2009 and 2010. That the line about Feathers and caps has many times been employed may equally be obvious.

Hedley on the Hill is a bit off the column’s usual route, a bit fringy, for all that. It was Saturday lunchtime, and we’d not planned to go there at all.

The unchanging goal is football, of course.

Fat chance of that of late. Plan B, pre-Christmas, was to hitch a ride on one of the Santa specials on the Tanfield Railway, near Stanley, followed by a bite in a local pub.

The trains were fully booked, Santa run off his feet. A look at the map suggested a long-anticipated diversion to Hedley, up through Rowlands Gill – where Wor Nanny also missed the train – through Pickering Nook and through Highfield, where to the extreme left Engels Terrace and Karl Marx Terrace still reside.

Beyond is Chopwell, formerly Little Moscow, and the hamlet of Leadgate Cottages where there’s a closed pub called The Bairns, with a sign like a school crossing patrol.

Hedley on the Hill tells its own story, lovely views and popular with gliders, the pub reckoned at least 200 years old. However rambling the route, it is abundantly worth finding.

The Feathers is also the parish council meeting place, a note on the bottom of the agenda advising that press and public are welcome. If Fleet Street gets to hear, there could be a stampede.

Rhian and Helen Cradock have had the pub since April 2007. He’s a North-East lad, just 15 when he did work experience with acclaimed chef Terry Laybourne, trained in restaurants while simultaneously earning an architecture degree at Liverpool University.

It is at once and ineluctably a proper pub, a place of cosy and bare-boarded little rooms and wood burning stoves, of well-kept real ales from small breweries, of efficient and welcoming young staff and of outstanding food.

The ambience – others do please note – is greatly helped by the absence of piped music.

Even the logo’s clever, though the Prince of Wales might not agree.

Many others have written much the same, of course, but why start the new year with an argument?

THOUGH it was a December lunchtime, we still bagged the last table, supped something suitably chocolatey from the York Brewery, perfidiously and progressively supposed that this might almost – almost – be as good as spending Saturday afternoon watching Northern League football in a snowstorm.

The menu changes daily. Resisting the temptation to shove the rest of their awards on the back, the reverse is a map of the North-East, or much of it, showing the many sources of their food – from Lindisfarne oysters to Sunny Hill eggs. The veal’s from Walworth, near Darlington, the rare breed lamb and beef once grazed out the back.

The North Sea’s included on the map, too, and a picture of a fish in case of any confusion.

A taster? Organic pumpkin and sage soup, perhaps? Home-made black pudding with poached free range egg and devilled gravy? Potted North Sea shrimps?

A main course? Cranston’s Cumberland sausage with creamy mash and real ale gravy would have been £9, Minsteracres pheasant and pork pie with mash, bashed swede and parsnips was £11, roast woodcock with its own pate and much else £14.

I began with a deep and piping hot bowl of local grouse and pheasant soup with port and redcurrant jelly, that rare sort of soup that makes you ponder appreciatively every spoonful before concluding that the phrase about what it says on the tin is metaphorical alone.

It was followed by wonderfully good twice-cooked duck leg with duck sausages, creamy mash and cabbage and bacon and by a pint of something excellent from the Cumberland Brewery.

The ginger parkin with a shot of mulled cider (£5) was perhaps something over which others might more enthusiastically have mulled, but that was simply a matter of taste.

The Boss, for once grateful to the sat-navigator in the front passenger seat, had started with a Caesar salad that she supposed up there with Jonny Edwards’s – praise, indeed – followed by fizzing fresh lemon sole with heritage potatoes, sprouting broccoli, lemon and capers.

A departing customer observed that the meringue with chestnut cream, candied chestnut and dark chocolate had been “sensational”, a view with which The Boss was inclined to agree. Odd that the coffee should be lukewarm.

We’d also pondered the village name, foolishly wondered if it might owe anything to William Hedley – he of the Puffing Billy – were offered a well-thumbed local history which traces it back to Norman times at least.

It talked also of local traditions, like the beer barrel race in which some of the local gentlemen appear to dress somewhat unconventionally – if a pinny and little else may so be described.

That’s in April. This was mid-winter. With drinks and coffee, a three-course meal for two was £60. We thought the whole, embracing experience well worth it. Happy New Year? Well, a great start, anyway.

■ The Feathers, Hedley on the Hill, Northumberland NE43 7SW. No food Sunday evening or Monday lunchtime or – please note – the first two weeks of January. Best to book – 01661-843607.

THERE has also been Christmas lunch with the Gaffer who, as previous columns have observed, should on no account be confused with the Boss. Nowhere near as fearsome. We went to Crusty’s in Northgate, Darlington and talked about retirement. Christmas lunch was £4.95; a foretaste, no doubt.

AN annual occasion throughout which this family has almost always been a happy part, The Lodge at Leeming Bar – formerly the Leeming Bar Motel – has been celebrating the 25th anniversary of its pantomime lunches.

In the true spirit of pantomime, even the menu’s much the same. Still there’s salmon enchanted evening, still Desperate Dandini pie.

The themed Sunday lunches in the approach to Christmas were the idea of Suzanne, joint manager then as now and still able to fit into the Buttons outfit she wore a quarter of a century ago.

She doesn’t look much older, either, though these days she has additional, weightier, responsibilities.

Carl Les, the Lodge’s long-time owner, may spend much of 2011 fretting over the outcome of the public inquiry into who should provide services on the upgraded A1 motorway.

Were the inspector to have been invited to the 25th pantomime lunch, his mind may have been made up already. They are excellent occasions.

DISCUSSING the recurring problem of where to find a good pub in the vicinity of Kings Cross station, we noted in September a recommendation from Philip Jones in Northallerton to try Smithy’s, in Leake Street. Sadly, we reported, it was closed and for sale. Philip insisted it wasn’t.

He’s right: that it was shut when we walked past the other day may have owed more to the fact that it was ten o’clock in the morning.

…and finally – new year but same old jokes – the bairns wondered if we knew where you send a kangaroo that needs glasses.

The hoptician’s, of course.