Scotland 2007

In April Patricia and I had a fortnight in Scotland. She was born in Lossiemouth on the Moray Coast but hadn’t been back since her sons were young. I’d holidayed in the North-West with Wife Number Two (a native of Dundee) for many years up until 1999 and wanted to reclaim the area for myself.

We booked a week self-catering at The Kenmore Club, which belongs to Sunterra - a holiday points club which we joined some years ago and from which we’d not managed to get much apart from our introductory freebie in Tenerife and a week in Mougins, near Cannes, a couple of years ago. That was followed by three nights at The Ceilidh B&B in Lossiemouth and three at i8mprobably named Morefield Motel in Ullapool.

Foodwise, the trip was very mixed.

At Kenmore we had two choices: the club’s own restaurant and one called The Courtyard, just across the road. We didn’t eat out until the night before we left. We looked at menus during the day - both were quite international, with rather complicated dishes, but The Couryard’s was more extensive and interesting so we opted for that. Unfortunately they were closed for a private wedding reception, so we booked at the club instead. We enjoyed the meal, but it was less than memorable - my starter, which was a sort of miniature Burns Supper of haggis, bashed neeps and chappit tatties - a little tower (surprise!) of mashed potato, mashed swede and haggis with a whisky-and-cream sauce. The haggis was good, the vegetable layers were okay but the whisky flavour in the sauce, if any, was totally masked by the haggis. My main course was duck breast with so many green peppercorns in the sauce that I had to pick most of them out.

(The butcher in Aberfeldy sold us two large and very expensive rib-eye steaks that looked wonderful on the slab but were very ordinary when grilled. I never leave anything when I eat a steak, but in this case the combination of quantity - lots - and quality - not a lot - led me to leave about a third of my helping.)

Our two full days at Lossiemouth were spent sight-seeing, and the only memorable meal was lunch in a village called Findhorn, at the improbably-named Kimberley Arms (Kimberley is a Nottingham brewery), which had a Tetleys sign outside (Tetleys is a Yorkshire brewery). The friendly (actually super-chatty) young barman explained that they had recently stopped selling Tetleys’ beers, but all the draughts were English. Not to worry: what had attracted us was the sign outside saying ’Fresh local seafood’, and the food we got was superb - well worth a detour if you’re in the area. Patricia’s seafood chowder was absolutely delicious. My cold seafood platter, a splendid mixture of fresh, smoked and soused fish and shellfish (plus decent ordinary prawns because they hadn’t received any langoustines that morning) served with loads of lovely fresh salad, was almost more than even I (ably assisted by Patricia) could finish. The only disappointment was the appearance on the specials board of crab salad after we had started eating - apparently the boss had just got back from Buckie, the nearest serious fishing village, with fresh crabs. Oh well - next time... (We did have a couple of acceptable meals at an Italian-style bar/café/restaurant on the waterfront at Lossiemouth. We also had fish suppers from one of the two chippies in the town: how can you produce poor fish and chips on the north-east coast of Scotland?)

I’d booked us into the Morefield Motel at Ullapool because I’d eaten some wonderful seafood there on previous visits - but not, I calculated, for eighteen years. This also-improbably-named establishment used to have a restaurant with a posh menu and a bar that served the most wonderful bar meals. It’s the only place where I’ve ever eaten lobster ’done properly’ - halved lengthwise while still alive and the halves dotted with butter and flashed under the grill. This was served with crisp, fresh salad and a jacket potato and was totally wonderful. As it turns out, the motel had changed hands a couple of times since then. The current owners are a chef from Coventry and his wife, who are still working on the food. The restaurant is now used only for breakfast and the full menu is served in the bar. It is extensive and quite complicated but the execution falls a bit short of expectation. The best thing I had was a cold seafood platter - a similar mix to the one at Findhorn - and just as good - but with four large whole langoustines on top. I hope they will revert to the original plan, with the posh stuff in the restaurant and stunning seafood, simply presented, in the bar.

I desperately wanted to go back to two other memorable eating places in the area.

The first was The Old School, on the road to Kinlochbervie (the last major turn-off before you fall off the end of the west coast at Cape Wrath). This used to be run by a delightful couple, and again it featured simply-presented ultra-fresh seafood. Alas, the old proprietors are long gone, and the young couple who have taken over have abandoned the seafood in favour of a small but international menu. We had coffee there (how do you make indifferent coffee with a big digital Gaggia espresso machine?) and decided not to go back to eat.

Instead, we found a bistro in Lochinver where we managed to get crab salads. The crab wasn’t bad, but it had obviously been in the fridge a little too long, so it lacked the magical flavour of a truly fresh one.

Finally, the good news...

Last chance: The Seafood Restaurant at Tarbet, which must qualify for the title of The Real Restaurant at the End of the Universe - visit the website to see just how remote it is! You have to drive three miles off the main road, on some of the most difficult of the area’s many single-track roads. This runs over little steep hills and alongside little lochs (lochans), and feels like ten miles. There are countless blind summits where you have to lean forward and upwards to look over the bonnet as you creep forwards to find out which way the road goes next - scary, but well worth it.

Tarbet can’t be called a village - barely a hamlet, even. It’s a place by the sea whose main claim to fame is that it’s where you get the boat to Handa Island, a wild bird reserve managed by the RSPB. It has a tiny beach with a few small fishing boats, a couple of houses - and the restaurant. I remembered several memorable meals from around 20 years ago, and I hoped against hope that it would be the one surviving place for great seafood.

The fact that it had been renamed The Shorehouse was a bit worrying, but when we read the notes in the menu we were reassured: it had been bought from the original owner by her son and his wife, and was run by the wife and their daughters while father and son concentrated on fishing. Clean, simple and with a stunning view, it was all I’d hoped for (well almost - they can only get you lobster if you give them a couple of days’ notice, and the beautiful little purple-and-white squid that I remembered, lightly fried in butter with garlicand parsley, weren’t on the menu). Patricia’s crab was startlingly fresh and ten times tastier than the ones at Lochinver. My eight langoustines were quite wonderful, so much so that it took us almost an hour to pick the last shreds of succulent meat out of the shells - including the heads, which I recently learned contain a small amount of tasty brown meat and, sometimes, coral (I’d also learned from Patricia, who’d apparently known it for years, that if you break off the finny bit at the end of the tail you can push the meat out in one piece - a lot less painful than breaking off each spiny segment of the shell!). The salads were full of flavour and the boiled-and-buttered new potatoes were delicious. This wonderful meal was washed down with a delicious lime and lemon-grass pressé that must have been home-made as I can’t find it via Google.

Well worth a major detour if you’re anywhere in or near Sutherland.

So a mostly-disappointing trip gastronomically, but crowned finally with one meal that more than lived up to both memories and expectations!

Two notes We didn’t get a decent cup of coffee - and did get the worst one I can ever remember drinking at Lossiemouth - until the first service area on the M74 south of Glasgow, which has a Costa coffee shop. And we did finally get decent fish and chips in Ullapool.