SITTING down at your restaurant table, you take in the resplendent surroundings. This is a high-class venue but then, you’re celebrating a special occasion and it’s nothing but the best tonight.

As your companions settle into their chairs and the waiter hands out the a la carte menus, you ask him for the beer list; but of course, he’s already brought it for you to peruse as you choose your starter.

One person in the group has to ask especially for the wine list, which the waiter goes off to hunt for as the rest of your party select beers that match your dishes and begin sharing them – discussing your favourites as you drink them from stemmed, branded glasses.

If you’ve experienced this, then I presume you must be from the future because it’s certainly not the norm in restaurants at the moment.

Of course, beer and food matching itself is nothing new – for years people have experimented with drinking different ale styles with food. Reams have been written about the right way, the wrong way – and even forgetting the way all together.

But the fact it’s been around for so long is precisely what makes it even more bizarre that it rarely happens in restaurants. It’s our national drink and now more than ever the very best beers are available at specialist shops and pubs.

Yet go to most eateries and you can peruse a long wine list from across the world, while there will only be four or five beers apologetically cowering at the bottom of the page – guests which the sommelier did not want at the party but felt obliged to invite. Generally, they won’t be local, but the products of a faceless multi-national.

Looking at the menus of some North East restaurants, perhaps the figures don’t sound too bad; one has 10 beers, including four locals. These are from the same brewery and the others are mainly big-brand.

But in comparison, wine has its own list, with 92 entries. Another has 96 wines, 19 whiskies – and even three types of Grappa.

The 11 beers – which to be fair include Duvel, Erdinger, and even Chimay Red and Blue among the Grolsch, Peroni and Magners – are listed among the bar drinks, as though people might drink them while waiting for a table but wouldn’t dream of asking for the list while they eat. And none are local.

This isn’t anybody’s fault, and certainly not the restaurants’ fault. It’s more a question of why this is the case, and why wine still predominates.

Hopefully, one day we will look back at this and see it as a bizarre anomaly. But there are several problems which seem to be standing in the way.

Kneeling at the fridge behind the bar, Andy Hook proudly reels off the names on his beer list. Blackfriars in Newcastle has a full page of beers, which includes local ales such as Durham Brewery’s Magus, Tyneside Blonde from Hadrian and Border, and Wylam’s Rocket and Bohemia. The owner generally has to go to breweries individually but, as is the well-publicised case with their food, they like to support North East producers.

Even then, it’s still 41 wines to 14 beers, but as Andy points out, economics has to play a part.

He says: “Wine’s a different thing – it has a higher margin than beer does and it’s an easy sell, so for that reason it’s a bit of a no-brainer that you’ll put more effort into it than your beer list.

“You have to treat beer as an add-on and hope that people drink more beer or start with beer and move on to wine.”

With bottles of beer at £4 and bottles of wine at about £20, then unless they buy wine by the glass, two people who just want a drink with their meal will be spending twice as much on wine, unless they guzzle down the beer because of its lower alcohol content.

But Andy says: “But we believe it’s better to give people what they want and let the [sales] figures come after it.”

It’s a proactive sentiment – that if the demand is there, then restaurants need have no fear in meeting it despite the lower margins. But this leads to the bigger problem: what’s the point in providing a product that people do not want, or rather, would not consider as a suitable meal accompaniment?

“If a bloke goes into a pub and eats, chances are he’ll have beer,” says Andy. “If you ask for a glass of wine your mates will laugh at you. If you go to a posh restaurant and drink John Smiths all night people will think you’re a bit of a heathen.

“You’ve got to overcome some of those traditions and we encourage that subtly: we have a whole page of beers, and the a la carte menu makes subtle references to beers; for instance, the belly pork needs a cider or local ale. It gets people thinking about them.

“Beer in restaurants has been talked about as the next big thing for a long time. We know it’s very good but we know it’s a hard sell. It’s not that we try to overtly push it – people come in and know if they want wine or beer.

“People have just always associated beer with pubs. You’ve got to be subtle because the last thing customers want is to be educated.”

I agree with Andy. I doubt ‘education’ is the right way with beer matching; patronising at best, it also creates a fear that there’s a wrong way to do it.

Things need to be kept as simple as possible, just like red and white rules with certain food.

Image is all-important, too – having beer in its own list with rich descriptions of their traditional craft credentials surely helps, so diners can conjure up malt houses folded into verdant fields and silent corners of ancient wooden breweries as they sip their ales.

A small-scale French wine producer crafting an artisan product using traditional methods would be lauded. Yet we have brewers just like this across the North East.

You can’t force people to want beer, but if it becomes cool as is already happening, they’ll want to be seen with it. A television series or appearance on Saturday Kitchen would help. And if people want to be seen with beer, then nice, branded glasses make the difference between an uncouth pint on the table and something special.

Andy says: “One of the things we push are proper branded glasses – it shows they’ve put thought into how it goes. We try to get as many glasses as we can. I think they’re missing a trick; if someone on the next table sees you with a nice glass, they might copy.”

Ironically, beer’s lower alcohol and smaller bottles are both a blessing and a curse. People like to share a bottle of wine; a Champagne bottle of higher strength beer would seem more special and one of Blackfriars’ beers, Estrella Damm Inedit, was made for Spain’s El Bulli restaurant and comes in 75cl bottles. It is also made specifically for food matching.

On the other hand, beer can be used in a way wine cannot; a group can order several types and sample them all without breaking the bank. Could promoting this kind of drinking help beer to conquer restaurants?

Desire will overcome most obstacles, but the easier breweries can make it to stock their products, the better. Andy says he currently has to make 10 calls for 10 different beers, and points to how some food producers have a coordinated supply chain.

But Matt Boyle, business development manager at Wylam Brewery, says the personal touch rather than going through a central stockist is an advantage.

He says: “You’ve got to have a close relationship and it counts for a lot. For us it’s been a nice way of targeting our perfect audience in terms of people who have disposable income and enjoy good quality food but also beer.”

Economics, image, promotion, and supply: facing so many hurdles, it feels the time is a long way off when beer will come in from the wilderness and claim its rightful throne. But it’s great that both restaurateurs and brewers in the North East have ideas that will smooth its path.