Bistro Citron Vert

Food ✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

1 Wellington St 
High Pittington 
County Durham 
DH6 1AZ 

0191 372 0564 
www.citronvert.co.uk 

Accessibility? Yes 
Gluten free? Yes 

I’ve been reworking my way through the best episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” as a sort of personal memorial to someone I never met, but who had the most wonderful gift for finding connections in and between food, people and places. 

He also had a great influence on my own cooking: his Les Halles Cookbook, which I bought in 2004, remains one of the most thumbed in my kitchen. It’s wonderfully funny and as outrageous as its author – in between the classic brasserie recipes it’s brimful of anecdotes of behind the scenes antics at the restaurant in Manhattan where he was head chef. His passion drips off the page like the juices of a medium rare côte de boeuf – I like to think he was a hopeless romantic about French cooking. 

It stands to reason, of course. Bourdain’s own childhood food epiphany was the consumption of an oyster while on a family holiday in the Gironde - “It tasted of seawater...of brine and flesh… and somehow...of the future”. 

For many of us, when classic French dishes are prepared and served well they can indeed raise the spirits. They taste of comfort, familiarity and reassurance. Nowadays this world can seem ablaze with division and fury and the future seems anything but certain. To enjoy a simple but delicious plate of food that has been prepared with skill and diligence, in much the same way as it has been since who knows when, is somehow to reject all the nastiness and look to a more stable world where, just maybe, things will turn out all right. Maybe. 

That’s the feeling I had anyway, as Mrs Diner and I set about our starters in Bistro Citron Vert. To be clear, this wasn’t high end French cuisine: nothing was flambéed, the sauces weren’t complex, there was no deft removal of bones at tableside. But sometimes a skilled rendition of the mundane can be more satisfying than stiff formality.

Côte

Food ✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

120-122 Grainger Street 
Newcastle upon Tyne 
NE1 5AF 

0191 731 4733 
www.cote.co.uk 

My attitude towards chain restaurants is ambivalent and ambiguous. It’s all too easy to point an accusatory finger in their general direction and prattle on about how they suck the life out of a town’s dining scene, what with their capitalistic economies of scale, hedge-fund backing and lowest common denominator menus. But, as with most things in life, it’s a touch more complicated than that. 

There are, of course, some seriously duff chains kicking about that meet the above description neatly enough, and add nothing to the variety or liveliness of our dining scene. A wander through our bigger shopping malls will acquaint you with some of these overpriced predators. But there are also others who manage to turn out good quality at reasonable prices, and, crucially, offer us something that wasn’t there before they pitched up. 

That’s the reason I gave a thumbs up when Byron came to town. On a good day, their burgers are some of the best in Newcastle. It’s also why I was less enthusiastic about Red's True Barbecue, arriving as it did at a point when the whole smokehouse thing had been done to death, and then dug up out of its sooty grave and done once more, just for good measure. 

And that’s why I was actually pleased to hear that Côte were moving into the old Barclays Banks in Newcastle’s Grainger Street. Over the past ten years (the first opened in 2007) I’ve visited several branches in other parts of the country and always enjoyed their incredibly cheap lunches (3 courses for £13.50, just like in France) and very good selection of house wines. I really hoped this one would match the rest. It does.

The French Quarter

Food ✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Arch 6 Westgate Road 
Newcastle upon Tyne 
NE1 1SA 

0191 222 0156 
www.frenchquarternewcastle.co.uk 

Accessibility? Yes 
Gluten free? Yes 

Despite the fact that almost every decent chef in the world cut his or her teeth on basic French cooking techniques, and despite the huge numbers of Brits every year who jet off to holidays in the Dordogne or the South of France, I’ve always thought it a bit odd that Britain has so few real French restaurants. 

Plenty of high-end gaffs are sort-of French of course, what with their extensive wine lists, long-reduced sauces and occasionally terrifying service, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m talking platters of meats and cheese reeking of farmyards, with bread and good wine. I’m thinking of simple, satisfying dishes such as pot-au-feu, choucroute and properly made coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon. I’m talking real French food, like you get all over France. And which I love. 

Is it some kind of oh-so-British reverse snobbery, or is it a lack of good ingredients, or sufficient skill and time in the kitchen? I guess it’s a lot less hassle to open up some half-arsed “Italian” or “Asian” place, slinging duff pizzas, gloopy sauces and similar crimes against decency. Or maybe it’s the recent but pervasive suspicion that French food isn’t what it was, that these classic dishes have kept it mired in ossified tradition (a view which, on the whole, prompts me to exclaim “C’est des conneries!”). 

Whatever. Suffice to say I was more than excited to learn that Hexham’s reliably good Bouchon Bistrot is no longer the region’s only thoroughly francophile restaurant. The fabulously named Cedric Boc-Ho and his partner Catherine Metcalfe have opened up The French Quarter in the railway arch that used to house the awful Sausage Emporium.

The Crathorne Arms

Food ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Crathorne 
North Yorkshire 
TS15 0BA 

01642 961 402 
www.thecrathornearms.co.uk 

What a difference a few miles make, I thought, as we pulled off the A19 and into the village of Crathorne. 

Just behind us was the industrial thrum of Middlesbrough and the Tees estuary, all belching chimneys and iconic chemical plants. In front of us was the very essence of a pretty village. Everything was in bloom. And, at the heart of it, a fine-looking whitewashed lump of country pub, the Crathorne Arms. 

In fact, to just call this place a pub would be to undersell its charms. It’s actually part of North East culinary history.

Truffle

Food ✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪ 

20 Grange Road 
Darlington 
County Durham
DL1 5NG 

01325 483 787 
www.trufflerestaurant.co.uk 

There is something wonderfully defiant and old-fashioned about a restaurant with a proper cheeseboard. 

To me, it shows that the place really cares for its produce (maintaining a good cheese board is both a science and a labour of love); it forces front of house staff to really swat up on the subject (you can’t just invent the names on the board – well, you could, but one day you’ll be caught out by a real fromage-fancier); above all, it offers customers like me a serious treat at the end of the meal, a journey of adventure with unexpected flavour bombs enroute. 

As an unreformed cheese addict who finds himself rather underserved in our region, this board was the first thing I spotted as we sat down to dinner at Truffle in Darlington. I took it as a very good sign indeed. I was mostly right.

Bouchon Bistrot

Food ✪✪✪✪ 
Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪✪✪✪ 

4-6 Gilesgate 
Hexham 
NE46 3NJ 
01434 609943 

www.bouchonbistrot.co.uk‎ 

Mon-Sat 12-2pm, 6-9.30pm 
Earlybird menu Mon-Fri 6-7pm 
Accessibility: Yes 

When we arrived, the downstairs restaurant was full of earlybirds. For £15.50, they were enjoying terrine, steak frites and crème caramel. It was like stepping into a bar in Calais. 

You’ve got to hand it to Greg Bureau, the man from the Loire who has taken Bouchon Bistrot into Hexham’s culinary heart. His Gallic gem is popular, and deservedly so.