7 hours Ago
There’s a steep grassy bank with hundreds of daffodils tumbling down on the right hand side, and on the left, there’s a glimpse of the Doric columns of the stately Eggleston Hall as it wallows in the open countryside above the River Tees. The driveway curves to the right, with the outline of a romantically ruined medieval church above you. It was abandoned in 1868 and now has a tall tree growing out of its roofless nave.
It is part of a garden centre hidden in the large walled gardens of the hall. And then, as you turn the bend, the tearoom appears, its broad arches partially screened by the tall trunks of the pines amid which the cars are parked. The tearoom is in the hall’s carriage house, and has had several incarnations in recent years.
We remember it as a fine dining restaurant and before that as a delicatessen, but now, opened only a month or so ago, it is a classic country tearoom with an antiques shop attached. This makes it a classic his ‘n’ hers venue: Petra, my wife, enjoys buying plants in the garden centre even though we have a garden full of them at home; I now can waste my money on fascinating old things that I really don’t need. The tearoom is run by the people who, a couple of years ago, set up Mrs Pumphrey’s tearoom at Ellerton Abbey in Swaledale – another fabulous location which featured a romantically ruined church with a tree growing out of its roofless nave.
The menu features an all day breakfast (£12.95), sandwiches, toasties, quiche, soup and scones. When we first stumbled into the tearoom on its first Saturday of operation about a month ago, Theo, my son, and I, shared a Ploughman’s Platter for two (£24.
95) which was an unarguable smorgasbord. Served on a large slate, it featured four types of warm bread, four cheeses, four little bowls of chutneys and pickles, and two halves of a hard boiled egg. There was plenty of home-cooked ham, salad, coleslaw and apple to keep the two of us going for days.
In fact, the slices of brie were nearly as big as the wedge I had just paid £3.50 for on Middleton-in-Teesdale’s farmers’ market, and, in the interests of research, we took all the butter that came with it home and weighed it: it came to 93 grams, and kept the family buttered for a week. When butter is, pound for pound, more expensive than gold, they do not need to be so generous.
We returned to the tearoom over the Easter weekend, now that it is properly up-and-running. The specials board had been expanded to include two soups, leek and potato or spiced carrot, and two quiches, brie and caramelised onion or bacon and three cheese. They’d also employed the youngest waitress in Christendom, who was very efficient when she wasn’t behind the counter snaffling Haribo.
In fact, all the friendly staff helped the meal along. Petra, my wife, chose the mackerel pate (£11.95), Theo and I went for the mixed bean stew with a meaty sausage on top (you could have either veggie sausages or feta on top) (£12.
95), and grandma had a ham sandwich (£8.95). Our drinks arrived in deliberately mis-matched antique crockery, promptly followed by our food.
The sandwich was full of home-cooked ham, and the pate was lovely and smooth, creamy but with just a touch of fishy sharpness. There was plenty of toast and even more butter, plus a bowl of sweet chilli sauce. Our bowls of bean stew contained tomatoes, onions, carrots, chickpeas, kidney beans, borlotti beans and aduki beans, and were rich, warm and hearty, served with a warm baguette (and too much butter).
We then investigated the cake cabinet, where prices ranged from £5.45 to £6.95, for which you got enormous helpings, accompanied by slices of orange and strawberry and a squirt of cream.
Grandma and Petra shared a pleasant lemon oat slice while I had a nicely balanced Mars cheesecake – it was very childish, with lumps of Mars bar on top of a sticky caramel sauce, but it was not overly sweet and I really enjoyed it. Theo also enjoyed his tiffin which was so gargantuan that his mother only allowed him to have half of it and even he, with an inexhaustible appetite for cake, might have struggled to finish had he been given a full run at it. Our first visit a month ago showed that the kitchen could assemble a platter very nicely, and this visit showed that it could cook tearoom fare just as well.
The only quibble was that it was very noisy. In the echoey coach house, chairs scrapped on the tile floors, crockery seemed to fall regularly, the coffee machine vented non-stop and a radio played with increasing loudness – when Bill Withers held that lung-busting note in Lovely Day, the longest note in US Top 40 history, the 18 seconds seemed to go on much longer as it reverberated all around us. Perhaps when the weather is a couple of degrees warmer, we’ll be able to sit out among the tree trunks and enjoy the tranquillity of Teesdale.
The Coach House Antiques & Tearoom, Eggleston, Barnard Castle DL12 0AG Tel: 07948 426099 Website: see Facebook Ratings (out of ten): Food quality 7 Service 7 Surroundings 6 Value for money 8.
