Bold certainly, but does it hit the spot?

We'd attended the opening night when it seemed half the city, along with the mayor, was crammed into the lower floor of a hotel in The Avenue, which makes up the small but very modern and chic bar and dining area of the new restaurant.

Escaping the maddening crowds, we picked up a menu before leaving, a menu split into two - "surrealism"

and "normality". The surrealism section was certainly novel, offering such bizarre dishes as white chocolate ravioli and caviar, warm yoghurt noodles and garlic chips and "genetic bread", and morphology of spring lamb, rosemary smoke, cauliflower puree and white truffle.

So we booked a table for last Thursday, eager to try these and other exotica. Unfortunately, the surrealism menu was off. We were told chef considered it "work in progress" and was not ready for public consumption yet. He may well be right there.

The other unfortunate aspect of our arrival was the desperate emptiness of the place - such a stark contrast to the opening night. We were the only folk in and nobody else arrived during the rest of the evening. With the entire, charming, very willing and anxious-to-please staff attending to our needs, it made for a somewhat uncomfortable atmosphere.

Looking at the normality menu over pre-dinner drinks, we noted touches of surrealism were present.

Hand-dived sea scallops with liquorice dressing (£9.95) and tempura of king prawn, pink ginger and fennel salad (also £9.95) seemed pretty weird.

Thinking that ten quid was a bit steep for a starter, Sylvia went for chicken Caesar "my way" (£6.95) and I chose home-dried plum tomatoes, mozzarella, dressed roquette and Parma ham crisps (£7.95).

My salad was pretty much as described.

Good quality mozzarella and subtly-flavoured tomato made for a relatively conventional and entirely acceptable first course. Was it worth eight quid?

Debatable.

Sylvia was surprised by her choice.

This was certainly not a Caesar salad done her way. Its centrepiece was a timbale of chicken, blended with a little creme fraiche and Parmesan. It was very dense and chickeney but on the dry side.

The addition of deep-fried anchovies added a salty zing to it.

Our main courses were similarly good in parts. Sylvia was altogether more enthusiastic about her whopping fillet steak of salmon with Bombay potato and seafood samosa (£15.50). The salmon was cooked to the point of perfection and the Bombay potato and grease-less samosa added a lightly- spiced crunchy piquancy.

My textures of pork, caramelised cauliflower, apple sauce(?) and puree of broccoli (£19.50) was packed with flavour. The "textures"

were pork loin and belly pork. The loin was wrapped in Parma ham and almost inevitably (how do you cook pork loin thoroughly and keep it moist?) was dry. The belly pork was better although not a patch on that served at Sedgefield's Dun Cow. The apple sauce(?) was not a sauce at all, more a jelly which wasn't particularly apple-flavoured.

We shared a dessert, a chilled rhubarb and custard "soufflé"

with rhubarb crisps (£5.95). This was very good. Intense rhubarb and creamy custard was only let down by the rhubarb crisps which were the texture of straw.

There's no questioning the boldness of the enterprise. But it is an expensive dining experience by North-East standards (our bill was £66 which included a pre-dinner drink but no wine) and it didn't quite work for us. Chef Sean Wilkinson is passionate about his work. That was evident when he emerged from the kitchen to ask us what we thought and also in the stream of complimentary between- course amusé bouches (carrot soda and pea caviar, scallops and ginger ice cream with beetroot sauce).

Some of his cooking is sublime but other elements seem contrived and experimental for the sake of being different. He needs someone like Gordon Ramsey to telling him, in his trademark f-fforthright fashion, to stop messing about.

There's also a certain preciousness about it all. Such as when we asked for some sea salt and ground pepper as our main courses arrived. There was a sharp intake of breath from the very attentive maitre'd, an awkward pause and we were asked to try the food before our wish might be considered and, perhaps, granted. The presumption was that chef knew best. Maybe he does but we felt like scolded schoolchildren.

Whether there are enough people prepared to spend serious money on a meal which is more likely to be interesting rather than wholly satisfying is a moot point. On the basis of last Thursday's turnout, we are not sure there are.

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