Ee-Usk, North Pier, Oban (eeusk.com; 01631 565 666). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80
Oban Seafood Hut, Calmac Pier, Oban (obanseafoodhut.co.uk). Meal for two: £20
A grey mid-afternoon at the end of the season, and down on the quay at Oban, on Scotland’s west coast, the CalMac ferry strains at its moorings and guns its engines, like an old man clearing his throat. There’s the clank of metal hull against stone, and the call of the gulls, and something else altogether more encouraging. It’s the smell of hot shellfish and butter and garlic. All these good things are coming from the Seafood Hut, which looks out across the harbour and which has been a gathering point here for years now.
It was set up by fisherman John Ogden, who used to cook the shellfish from these waters – the crabs and lobsters and scallops and, best of all, the langoustines – for his crewmates while out at sea, and concluded there would be a market for what he did on dry land. So it proved. Not that they do that much. Scallops the size of a Labrador’s paw are less seared than heated through and served in a puddle of salty garlic butter. Langoustine tails, pulled from their shells with the minimum of force, are given the same seeing-to. As ever, their sweet meats make me despair at the legions of British people who run screaming from their eyes and claws, meaning the best of the catch goes out to Spain, where they have sense. Vast mussels are given the marinière treatment on a burner outside the hut. There are rock oysters and lobsters and crab sandwiches as thick as my arm.
The prices are absurd. The most you can spend is £25 on a seafood platter, which includes lobster. The scallops or langoustine tails are £6.95, the crab sandwiches £3.95. Mind you, the platter with the seafood is pure polystyrene, and there’s just one outside communal table made from half a tree and then varnished an Essex-tan shade of orange. Generally you eat with your fingers while standing up, and revel in the dribble of hot butter down your shirt and the stickiness and the funk, which you know will still be there later when you sniff your hands – even if you do use the sink just outside the hut.
Do I need tell you that in its clanky, knockabout, “a little bish here and a little bash there” way, the Seafood Hut is perfect? Of course not. It’s what those of us who are obsessed with the best the depths can offer dream of. You want to be there now. It can leave even the most cynical of us muttering about the joys of ruggedness and how you only really need the essentials. It makes restaurants that also serve seafood but have fripperies such as tables, chairs and china plates and walls and ceilings look sluggish and flat-footed.
Which is unfair. The low-slung, red-roofed building which houses Ee-Usk – it’s Gaelic for fish – is directly across Oban’s harbour from the hut. It’s been on the tip of the North Pier for a couple of decades now and does look clean and well-mannered by comparison. The Seafood Hut is a schoolboy with dirty knees compared to Ee-Usk’s public-school sixth-former in newly pressed blazer. In truth it’s a solid seafood brasserie doing all the right things with all the good stuff. There are crabs and lobsters from off the coast of Luing and langoustines and mussels from Loch Linnhe. Scallops come from Mull, and flat fish from all around. All the shellfish arrive at their kitchens alive, which is the best way.
On a Monday night at 9pm, the place is rammed. The front-of-house team, mostly women from the town, scuttle about the brightly lit dining room inventing numbering systems for the larger tables and resisting any attempts at substitutions. They’ve run out of mussels, apparently – a key component of their starter and main course seafood platters – so no, you can’t have those tonight. And no, they won’t swap anything else in. OK. Their room, their rules.
Here, unlike at the hut, the scallops are properly seared and come with a tidy tian of spiced rice. Sizable langoustines are halved and grilled with garlic butter. It’s up to you whether you bother to get the meat from the claws, but by this point in the day I am so far steeped in shellfish it seems silly not to. There is the exotica of Thai fishcakes which are, as they should be, almost all fish and chilli heat and no filler, alongside the sort of sweet chilli sauce that few kitchens bother to make for themselves. For the non-fish eaters there’s deep-fried brie; try as I might I can’t stop myself tipping my head on one side and muttering: “Ah, bless” with knowing nostalgia, but it’s good deep-fried brie.
The stars of the main courses are the flat fish at impressive prices: £18.95 for Dover sole is the kind of offer guaranteed to make this jaded, surrendered and overplundered Londoner sigh. It’s a meaty, properly trimmed specimen, the flesh coming away from the bone with a single pull of the knife’s flat, eventually to leave a clean skeleton like something that’s been scarfed by the Top Cat crew. There are tranches of perfect halibut, oven-baked with creamed leeks, and more heaps of langoustines and fishcakes, all served with bowls of rustling deep-fried squared potatoes and salad. Which is really all you want. They know how to grill steaks for those friends of yours who claim problems with fish but are still willing to make up the numbers.
After a day spent dispatching more seafood than can ever be strictly necessary, we do not have the wherewithal for sticky toffee pudding or lemon cheesecake, but they all look fine as they pass. We drink Picpoul de Pinet at £23.50 a bottle, which is about right. We put our elbows on the table and watch as the light falls and the sea outside turns from gunmetal grey to the thick black of ink.
Ee-Usk describes itself as the “Seafood Capital of Oban”, which is quite a claim for a town that has clearly decided to build its reputation on the local catch. The quayside is littered with restaurants which look like they could show you a good time. I suspect any trained chef who knows one end of a crab from another and hankers for some big skies and hardworking sea should make their way to Oban. Don’t worry about the pay. There will always be the Seafood Hut to keep you fed on a budget.
Jay’s news bites
■ The Oyster Bar at London seafood stalwart J Sheekey shares only one thing with Oban’s offerings: the quality of the ingredients. The prices will make you gasp, but Sheekey’s is a classy, metropolitan marble-counter affair serving a wide selection of pristine oysters alongside the likes of lobster mayonnaise (jsheekey oysterbar.co.uk).
■ The talented Darren Comish, who single-handedly cooked a quite astonishing meal for me at the Oak Bank Hotel, Grasmere, has moved to take over the restaurant at Lake District stalwart Holbeck Ghyll. Lucky them. This follows making it to the finals of MasterChef – The Professionals (holbeckghyll.com).
■ Following the decision by Restaurant Sat Bains to move to four days a week, County Durham restaurant the Raby Hunt has scrapped lunch services. ‘I want a better standard of life for the people who work here,’ said chef James Close. More proof of the shortage of quality chefs affecting the UK restaurant industry. (rabyhunt restaurant.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
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