Telephone: 01862 892281
Address: Tain, Ross-shire
Open: Lunch 12 noon-2.30pm, dinner 5-9.30pm, both daily
Guide prices: £70 for two (with wine)
Disabled access
As a child, I was mystified by animal heads mounted on the walls of grand houses. Whenever I saw a stag's head, I'd naturally assume the poor creature had been involved in a freak accident, and had smashed into the wall at high speed, its antlers drilling a hole right through the plaster. Indeed, I'd often check in the adjoining room, or even outside the house, expecting to see the rest of the carcass dangling there, solid with rigor mortis. I still cannot understand who on earth would want to mount an animal, unless the rumours I've heard about a couple of MPs (who shall remain nameless) are true.
You can barely move for stags' heads and Monarch of the Glen paintings at the Morangie hotel, situated in the wild and beautiful countryside of Ross and Cromarty. Trouble is, the 40-minute drive northwards from Inverness station was one long reminder that nature is simply a never-ending conjugation of the verb "to eat" (in the active and passive voices), and that sanguinary lesson had rather taken the edge off my appetite by the time I arrived.
Nor did I warm to the decor in this late-Victorian mansion, which exhibits the sort of taste that has doubtless delighted the House of Windsor whenever they've dropped in, as the Queen Mother did in 1991, and more recently Prince Andrew. Or perhaps it was Edward. I always confuse those two, and can never remember whether it was the Duke of York or Wessex who "had 10,000 men . . . and when they were only halfway up they were neither up nor down".
The hotel boasts two restaurants - the Garden ("providing an informal and relaxed setting for lunch or dinner") and Cousteau's ("serving local produce, particularly seafood) - and, to be honest, I'm not exactly sure which one I ate in. Not that it really matters, because just as the interior design is a homage to a Scottish past that never really existed, so the panoply of menus thrust into my hands all seemed determined to recreate a long-gone gastronomic era that should never have existed.
For the first time since I began writing about restaurants (decades), I actually saw on a menu the words "duck à l'orange", a misguided dish from the postwar era that I refuse to eat not only for aesthetic reasons, but on moral grounds, too, because ducks share a deeply unpleasant propensity with certain humans. No, it's not getting stuffed with oranges (that only applies to the errant MPs mentioned earlier); it's that ducks and humans are the two species with the greatest propensity to commit rape.
I've momentarily forgotten what I ordered as a starter, but my guest (who considers himself something of a ladies' man) tried to enter into the spirit of culinary naffness by ordering a prawn cocktail. It arrived with a single mussel on top, and was coated in "a sauce that tastes bitter", which is the one thing a prawn cocktail should never be (made properly, it's virtually a dessert). His roast gigot of lamb with minted pears was equally grim, being covered in a thick gelatinous sauce, and looking like one of those Findus tin-foil Sunday roasts for one that I occasionally resorted to when I was an impecunious student.
As for my beef stroganoff, the "GM-free meat" had been sautéed with mushrooms and onions, then doused in a cream brandy sauce and served with a timbale of rice; the result was thick and glutinous, and had a whiff of the microwave about it. Oh, and the potatoes were stone cold, while the cauliflower tasted (according to the rake's enigmatic verdict) "like air would taste on Venus".
If only the menu had also listed Brown Windsor soup, then I'd have known that this was an elaborate hoax, and that Jeremy Beadle would soon be appearing to tell me, "Don't worry - it's all been a joke. The real executive chef is Heston Blumenthal." Sadly, Beadle wasn't about, but nevertheless this was a joke that got even worse when a sizzler (the type they have in inferior Chinese and Indian restaurants) arrived at an adjacent table, its dramatic potential fatally undermined by being transported there beneath a cloche.
And finally, the cheese board was a mockery, with the "Scottish selection" consisting of Desperate Dan-style individual portions, each slab the size of a King Penguin paperback -and about as appetising.
John and Avril Wynne and their family have dedicated themselves to the restoration of Morangie House Hotel, and it hurts me to write this more than it will hurt them to read it. They and their staff provided a first-class, efficient and friendly service. But they've been let down badly by a chef who is decades behind the times, and they must get their kitchens sorted out, not least because I've just remembered what I had for my starter: "Dingwall haggis served on a pastry boat with a pool of Arran mustard sauce" - a sort of minced beef McWellington.
Frankly, I've not seen such a clash of nationalities since I ate at that Sino-Teutonic restaurant I told you about a while ago called A Wok In The Black Forest. On that occasion, I was offered something resembling a sweet-and-sour weiss sausage, and, quite rightly, I feared the wurst.
