'The gherkin ketchup! The dark jus! The melting beef!' Coarse, Durham

It was a wet and cold winter lunchtime in Durham and I was hungry.

A stranger in town, I had two hours to kill before my train so I consulted my trusty Harden’s Guide. The app has a useful search button which brings up all the recommended restaurants near you, and it offered me Faru, which was closed on a Thursday lunchtime, and Coarse, which advertised a three-course lunch for £27. Bingo.

If you’re not familiar with Harden’s, it’s Tripadvisor for foodies. People who like eating send in reviews once a year, the guide collates them, and then scores the eateries out of five for food, service and ambience, and offers a summary of the reviews. It’s authoritative in London and increasingly so in the provinces. Coarse gets a five for food, a four for service, and a three for ambience. It was worth a punt.

Coarse by name but not by nature

If ever there was a misnamed restaurant, Coarse is it. It has courses, yes, four in my case if you include the amuse bouche, but they were not in any way coarse.

The amuse bouche was exactly that. Chef was doing a take on Burns Night with a puree of swede, a little haggis pie sitting in the middle topped with shards of potato crisp, and two dots of a whisky and orange marmalade relish. The puree was warm which was the first surprise while the pie pastry was crispy and light and seemed to contain essence of haggis. As for the relish, it gave a sweet and sour edge. I love haggis, so hoorah, and so much work devoted to a pre-starter boded well.

The nominal first course, Winter Root, Miso, Truffle, Walnut, presented as a parsnip, truffle and miso foam, topped with parsnip crisps and chives. I am normally allergic to foam given it reminds me of a number of things you don’t want to recall when you’re eating, but this foam had structure. Delicious in itself, it turned out to contain other delicious things including malt syrup-glazed artichokes, turnip puree, pearl barley, candied walnuts, and pickled shallots. “This is a fairground for the taste buds,” I thought, and felt rather pleased with myself.

Beef Cheek Reuben next. To me that’s a salt beef sandwich on rye with swiss cheese and sauerkraut, to be found in Jewish delis everywhere. Here it is a succulent, melting piece of beef cheek cooked with pastrami spices, sitting on shredded hispi cabbage and rye grains, in a dark beef gravy, with an orange and celeriac ‘finger’ and some dots of gherkin ketchup. And yet it reminded my mouth of the very best reubens I have ever eaten. The gherkin ketchup! The dark jus! The melting beef! I could be Sally in Katz’s Deli.

I went off-piste for pudding. The advertised selection was Rhubarb, Pistachio, White Chocolate. I haven’t been able to eat rhubarb since being force-fed it at school, so the waitress, in the helpful manner typical of the staff here, brought me the other choice from the £49 tasting menu, Tea, Biscuit, Milk, which turned out to be a sphere of Yorkshire Tea-infused malt ice cream topped with a lattice of dried milk, daintily served in a teacup with a matcha biscuit in the saucer. Sweet, light, exactly right.

Coarse has a good selection of wine by the glass, and a bottle of Nyetimber which, at £55, has to be the resto fizz bargain of the year, and the year has barely begun. With 250 ml of a tasty Bardolino and a decent tip, my bill came to £46.

Harden’s Guide proved right again with excellent food, very good service, and an ambience that makes you think about the food and the company rather than the bling. Coarse is tucked away in Reform Place, off North Road, and there’s a taxi rank one minute away, all the better to take you up the vertiginous hill to the station.

By Chris Wallis