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| Every Wednesday in the Evening Gazette |
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Bring back the classic café
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Well, it's certainly good news that the Albert Park Clock is coming back home in all its Victorian glory. Together with the revamped bandstand and the reclaimed fountain, the park will soon become a time capsule where if you shut your eyes, and try to block out the noise of the traffic, it is 1955, and God is still in his heaven. This is where the Park Gate comes in. Immediately outside the gate on Linthorpe Road was one of Middlesbrough's premier greasy spoons, a place where you could get everything from an all-day breakfast to a humble round of toast and tea. Now that café, along with many others of its kind, has gone to the great trattoria in the sky. Replacing them up and down the country are the new branded outfits - Starbucks, McDonalds, Costa Coffee..... All of them share the same characteristics. They are often very expensive. They are impersonal and simply have no soul. Good old fashioned greasy spoons had common characteristics. They sold fry-ups that would horrify today's food faddists. Their décor was - to say the least - eclectic. The last refuge of genuine blue neon was the great British café. It was such a café where the last sighting of the tomato shaped plastic sauce squeezer was made. They were often managed by generations of a family from the Italian diaspora, presided over by a matriarch who kept a careful eye on her regulars from behind the chrome espresso machine. Or, by a male restaurateur who saw the café as his living and his daytime social life rolled into one. They engaged with their customers in a way no uniformed supervisor for one of the franchised coffee or burger clones could ever do. They helped form popular culture. I learnt to love Ska and Reggae because, as a kid, I frequented a rather seedy café run by a man called Ernie. Though born and bred in the UK, he had come across that music in the Royal Navy in the Caribbean, and made sure his juke box matched his own tastes. Such a man would struggle to survive in today's world. There are thankfully some good old fashioned café's left. But they are a vanishing breed. So let us celebrate the survivors - like Grubb's Diner on Middlesbrough's Newport Road, opposite the bus station, an establishment that runs with seamless ease from breakfast through to lunch and full dinners. There is a similar café in Redcar's Corporation Road, near the junction with Station Road. Stockton had a small number of good little Formica-tabled eateries on the twilight northern part of the High Street - and, as far as I know, they still survive. But when you hit the shopping malls your only choice is chewing on pallid pap that costs a fortune and sustains you for all of four minutes. Adrian Maddox, the author of a new book on the old greasy spoon - "Classic Cafes", puts it succinctly: "Orwell's nightmare vision of 1984 was a jackboot stamping on a human face for ever - but we now know the reality - that the future is now best represented by a boiling skinny latte spilt in the lap of humanity for perpetuity." Tea in your eye ! Park-bencher |
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