Serving the Teesside Business Community | 9
The Business Buzz
With award-winning
writer Harry Pearson
The Curing House. It’s not good, it’s great!
Why doesn’t Newcastle have anything
like this? The Smeltery at mima.
T
here are some sentences you never
expect to hear. One of them is “I’ve
got a new girlfriend” coming out of
the mouth of a 55-year-old man. But
this time last year I heard it quite a
lot for the simple reason that the man saying
it was me.
Anyroad, one of the things my new
girlfriend said to me quite early on in our
relationship was: “Will you take me to
Middlesbrough? I have always wanted to
go to Middlesbrough.” My girlfriend grew
up in Wales, but even so I thought she was
probably exaggerating.
Still, it was nice to picture her as a child
shaking her dad’s arm and pleading: “Please,
please can we go to Teesside this summer?”
and her dad replying: “I’m sorry but your
mum is insisting on Sorrento for some
reason.”
“Yes,” I told my girlfriend, “We can do that.
There are some great clothes shops, mima
and these fantastic micro-pubs and…”
“We can have lunch,” my new girlfriend
interjected.
At this point I began to feel a bit nervous.
You see, amongst her many
accomplishments my new girlfriend was
once an inspector for the Michelin Red
Guide. She was the person who assessed
the consistency of Michel Roux’s clafoutis
and decided if Gordon Ramsay’s ruby chard
was sufficiently wilted. And when she’d
finished in England she went and did the
same thing in France.
So you can guess that I felt a little under
pressure.
The main problem was that I was looking
Tales of the
unexpected
back to the last time I’d taken a new girlfriend
out to dinner in Middlesbrough, which was in
about 1985.
I recalled a meal in which the starter was
fruit juice and the roast chicken came with
gravy so thick you needed a steak knife to
cut it, roast potatoes that looked like charcoal
briquettes and a dollop of cabbage that
had been boiled until it resembled a dead
jellyfish.
The pudding was nothing to write home
about either, unless your parents happened
to be health inspectors.
I thought of meals before that one, too.
Going with my Aunty Molly to the posh
upstairs restaurant at Binns when I was
about six. There was a woman in an evening
gown playing the harp and my request for a
prawn cocktail was refused on the grounds
that prawns were seafood and therefore so
dangerously foreign that only men who had
done military service in the Far East were
allowed to eat them.
All the other food was white and mashed
so that people who’d left their false teeth at
home could eat it, which was just as well
since my Uncle Joe had forgotten his.
I tried to think of something positive -
the frothy coffee at Rea’s up at the top of
Linthorpe Road; the sandwiches from The
Little Pork Shop that my mum and dad and I
would buy after shopping trips on Saturday
mornings, eating them in our Morris Oxford
whilst sitting in a carpark round the back
of Jack Hatfield’s; the Italian deli, Italcibo,
where you could buy authentic, doughy
Neapolitan pizzas that came in a vacuum-
sealed polythene bag.
It wasn’t much. But thankfully things have
changed since then.
Teesside now has a bubblingly ebullient
restaurant scene, from the glorious restored
splendour of Acklam Hall to the socially
conscious excellence of The Fork in the Road.
Only last week I met a couple of friends
who work in the art department at the
University of Northumbria. “We’ve just been
to Middlesbrough,” they said. “We went to
the new restaurant at mima. Jeez, why isn’t
there anywhere like that in Newcastle?”
But a year ago I wasn’t quite so certain.
“So,” I said when we got off the train at
Middlesbrough, “Where do you want to go
to eat?”
“I made a list of places that sounded
interesting,” my new girlfriend said. “Which
is nearest?”
Half an hour later we were sitting at the
speckled marble counter in The Curing House
on Bedford Street, eating a big platter of
charcuterie and drinking chilled manzanilla.
“This is good,” I said, trying to keep the
note of surprise out of my voice.
“Good?” my girlfriend replied. ‘No, it’s
great. I feel like I’m in Manhattan!”
Like I say, there are some sentences you
never expect to hear - but it’s very, very nice
when you do.