Fore Road, Kippen, Stirlingshire (01786 871 010), and The Lake of Menteith Hotel, Port of Menteith, Perthshire (01877 385 258).
Meal for two, including wine and service, around £65 at both
The night I went to the Inn at Kippen I had a touch of leprosy. This is the only explanation I can give for the way I was treated. The inn is an attractive, cream-coloured building in the middle of this well-to-do village 45 minutes' drive north of Edinburgh. When I arrived I was shown into the left-hand room, a very un-pubby space with rust-coloured walls, a baby grand piano and no people. I remarked on the absence of punters. 'Oh, there are other people here,' said the waiter. Where are they? 'Next door, on the other side of the entrance.' I asked if I might eat there instead. Grudgingly he took me to where there were 20 people having dinner.
What is it with British restaurants and single eaters? In America it's rarely a problem. In France it's taken as the mark of a discerning diner. Here, the thinking goes like this: if they are eating alone they have no friends. If they have no friends it's because they are horrible. If they are horrible we must quarantine them and poke them with pitchforks. It was not a great start to the evening, which did not improve when they brought me food.
It wasn't bad, exactly. It was just trying far too hard. What was one to make of a dish described as 'smoked chicken, Parma ham with figs, mango and strawberries'? In February? Or 'Warm parsnip, spinach and creme fraiche roulade with hot tomato jam'? And why was I told that the soup was 'freshly made'? Was it because everything else was made three weeks ago? I'm sure not, but it did suggest the language on the menu was being used to compensate for deficiencies on the plate - and so it proved.
I decided to stick to the simple stuff. So it was an Arbroath smokie pate with a seasonal salad and hot toast. Except the toast was anything but. And the pate was so fridge-cold I felt it on my teeth long before I tasted it on my tongue. All the essentials were here for a great starter. Arbroath smokies have a dense, rich, oily taste which stands up well to the pate treatment, but needs warmth to get the flavours moving.
For my main course I went super-safe and ordered steak pie. It arrived in its own little pot, with a pile of over-boiled green beans and carrots plonked on top of the pastry, as if they couldn't work out what else to do with them. Next to them was a bowl of chunky chips. If I had my way, chunky chips would be banned. They are meant to signal generosity on the part of the kitchen. What it really means is that they don't have to spend so long chipping the potatoes. They also never fry them for long enough, so you get a mush of steamed potato.
The steak pie was fine, but no better. The meat was tender and the gravy had reasonable depth of flavour, but the filling lacked character. It reminded me of those ready-made steak fillings you buy from butchers. I finished with a hot clootie dumpling - a rich fruitcake, akin to a Christmas pudding - with a scoop of ice cream on top of which was a cape gooseberry, served on a translucent coloured plate flecked with glitter.
I had no idea what the fruit was doing on the top or why such a plate was on the bottom. And then it occurred to me that this might all be my fault, or the fault of food journalists like me. Always on the hunt for the new and diverting, we write about exotic fruits and presentation plates and then places like the Inn at Kippen, who haven't worked out the importance of serving pate at the right temperature, get cape gooseberries in to adorn their clootie dumplings and buy ludicrous plates of the sort Mrs Shilling might have worn to Ascot as a hat.
It doesn't need to be this way. The night before, I ate at the Lake of Menteith Hotel, which is part-owned by one-time Michelin-starred chef Nick Nairn. He has a cookery school nearby, where he smokes his own salmon, and my starter was a tranche of that fish, hot-seared and served with shredded vinegary beetroot as a foil. It was an unarguable combination. After that came roast chicken - something many restaurants find hard to get right - the skin crisp and well seasoned, the flesh tender, lubricated by a morel cream sauce. I finished with sticky toffee pudding. And there wasn't a cape gooseberry in sight. Plus they didn't treat me like my skin was suppurating. I know which place I preferred.
