Sunday Lunch
Enjoy Sunday Lunch at The Cleveland. Sunday carvery available for just:
£2.95 Adult
£2.45 Child.
BEST VALUE IN TOWN
Choice of Meats (Roast Beef, Pork or Chicken) with a selection of fine vegetables and home cooked Yorkshire Puddings. If you have left some space then choose from our selection of desserts for just £1.30
The Sunday Carvery is served from 12 - 3pm and no booking is required. There is car parking available at the rear of the pub.
Mike Amos Headline Tuesday 17-6-2003.
The Northern Echo is tops at bringing the best of the North East to the North East and their reporter Mike Amos was voted North East Journalist Of The Year for, among other things, his column "Eating Owt"!
It was only a matter of time before he got to The Cleveland and received a very pleasant surprise...
We feel that "Mike Amos" of "The Northern Echo" can do a better job than we ever could, so we'll let him speak here.
Here's Mikes piece on The Cleveland's Sunday Lunch
© The Northern Echo
Sunday lunch for two for a fiver - and it's good food too. What more could you want on the Sabbath?
Surreal Neil is a Marske United supporter, is familiar on many North-East cricket grounds and collects telephone exchanges - those little brick outhouses on the edge of three figure villages - in the way that others collect train numbers.
Once he came across one with curtains, a find so exciting he'd to pull himself quite together.
It's irrelevant really, except that Karl Crawford wrote recommending Sunday lunch at the Cleveland in Redcar and added, as if seeking to establish what the Romans might have called his bona fides, that he was a friend of Surreal Neil's.
A surreality check, as it were..
The Cleveland is in High Street West, sufficiently far west not really to be in the High Street at all but for a Tudor navigator to worry about falling off the edge of the earth.
It's part of an elderly terrace in Coatham, inland from the boating lake, across the road from the bookie's and may be termed unprepossessing without fear of a writ from the brewery. "It's not a rough pub, but on the other hand it doesn't have new carpets," wrote Karl.
We went two Sabbaths ago, on the day that the Sunday Times listed its selection of Britain's 20 top seaside hotels. Though Seaham Hall, astutely marketed, was among them, the Cleveland (not altogether surprisingly) was not.
The differences are infinite, among them that the last time we had Sunday lunch at the Seaham Hall Hotel it was £27.50 (each) and that at the Cleveland you can eat as much as you like for fifty bob. Puddings, for those of a truly egregious appetite, are an extra £1.
The arrangement is that a chitty (and perhaps a pint) is bought from the bar and a lengthy queue formed at a little carvery counter. A poster announces that the meat is from Fawcett's of Redcar, Neil Diamond warbles on the CD, the television is pictured, mute and sullen, in one corner.
The choice is beef, pork or chicken with an optional sausage (a Redcar tradition, no doubt) with Yorkshire puddings and mountains of fresh vegetables, cheerfully and continually replenished from out the back.
Regulars balance stacked high plates like a trainee librarian might carry a pile of books - steps uncertain, knees buckling, eyes barely visible over the top. Were the great edifices any more precarious, they would surely need a scaffold and an advisory inspection by English Heritage.
Mr Jack Cohen may have had something similar in mind when he spoke of piling it high and selling it cheap, though even the great Blondini would be stretched to maintain the equilibrium.
With the possible exception of the roast potatoes, which The Boss considered "disgusting", it is precisely the sort of meal which might be enjoyed at thousands of North-East dinner tables but without the hassle, cost and necessity of shopping, scraping and cooking.
£2.50, indeed, would barely cover the bus fare to one of Mr Cohen's establishments - he was the founder of Tesco - and may unless others know otherwise represent the country's least expensive Sunday dinner.
We forewent pudding, even home made for £1, partly because of eyes and belly syndrome and partly because the seats, like dead man's shoes, were already being coveted.
Lindsey and Chris Appleby took on the pub as tenants, bought it and are working tremendously hard to make it work. We wish them every success: the surreal thing, undoubtedly.
