The Kitchen, 15 Huntly Street, Inverness IV3 5PR (01463 259119). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80
A few weeks ago Boath House, a handsome grey stone hotel and restaurant 20 miles outside Inverness, announced it was abandoning the six-course tasting menu which had helped it keep a Michelin star for a decade. Maintaining the aesthetic demanded by the tyre company was just too expensive. Apparently, we don’t want tiny saucers of tweezered disappointment. We want informality. Quite so. This came on the back of news that the legendary French restaurant Bras, which had held three stars for 30 years, was also removing itself from Michelin.
And so to Inverness to try out this brave new approach. All I can say is that if this is informality, I would not have been psychologically equipped to cope with the previous regime. I’ve had more fun at the chiropodist, getting my corns removed. No really. At the chiropodist’s I had a jolly chat with the staff and left feeling better than when I arrived. I left the Boath House with my will sapped. It is a brilliant opportunity wasted.
On a Saturday lunchtime it’s a silent, empty place of polished floorboards, walls full of price-tagged art and saggy wing-back chairs. Last night’s burnt out tea lights are on the tables. A waitress appears, gives us a half smile and responds to a request for coffee with two cups of something watery and dull. There are just two choices at each course at lunchtime, for £30. I ask to look at the dinner menu. The choice rises to four, the two available at lunchtime and two more. The price goes up to £45.
I ask if any of the dishes from the previous night’s menu are available. I’ve asked this in other restaurants and they’ve usually been more than willing to oblige. No, she says, absolutely not. We point out that there is no non-meat option on the lunchtime menu, whereas the evening menu has “chickpea, chilli, cucumber, pickles”. Nope, that’s not available either. It’s peculiar. Restaurants live and die by their preparation. Clearly this place prepared exactly enough of absolutely everything for service.
We are deposited in the bare-tabled dining room. We are the only people in there, but they nevertheless put us by the doorway to an abandoned dining room, the lights off, the tables unlaid. When another couple turns up they are placed right next to us. I suppose it makes a round trip from the kitchen that much more efficient.
And so to this informal food. A narrow, gummy strip of treacle-cured salmon arrives, with cubes of bitter, sickly sweet grapefruit jelly sprinkled with edible blooms. So that’s the flavours of warm raw salmon and marmalade. An underseasoned parsley root soup is served merely warm, and is pale, thin and uninteresting. This is a neurotic person’s version of sophisticated food. It’s a fancy dinner as made by people with no instinct to feed.
A piece of cod is well cooked if again underseasoned, but comes on an undercooked smoked haddock risotto, all hard rice and limp, pallid liquor. A long-braised blade of beef comes with a huge lump of fat in the middle, hard turnips and brutal fragments of chewy pancetta. More time has been spent on the look of these plates than on the taste of them. The best things come from the pastry department: a fine soft white loaf served warm with butter (unsalted, of course; salted would be too encouraging and unpuritanical for this place), a serviceable pear and frangipane tart and a curious poppy seed parfait which tastes only of cream and not at all of poppy seeds.
What sticks with me, though, is the utter, death-watch gloom of the whole experience: of bored waitresses and a kitchen just working a shift; of joylessness and hushed mutterings and no sense whatsoever that this venture belongs to anyone.
That night, back in Inverness, I grab a late supper at the Kitchen restaurant, a tottering modernist brasserie overlooking the river, and thank God for it. What troubles me about somewhere like the Boath House is it acts like some culinary black hole, dragging in all the restaurant coverage, of which there is only a finite amount. Meanwhile the Kitchen keeps doing what it has done for years: knocking out solidly built plates of food for people who have come to be looked after. Is it artful and striking? Is it surfing the wave of newness and pushing the culinary envelope? Is it hell. It’s dinner.
There is a contented babble rising across three floors when we arrive and staff who seem genuinely pleased to see us all. There are nutty brown shrimps in spiced butter with thick slices of warm treacly bread and, on the side, a pile of frisky pickled cucumber. A disc of black pudding is seared to crisp and served with egg mayonnaise and a smokey purée of roasted tomatoes. It’s a riff on breakfast delivered after sundown. There are long-braised beef cheeks glazed with an intense seafood bisque in a way that shouldn’t work but does. All that shellfish reduced to its essence brings a huge umami boost to these glossy balls of fragile meat. It’s a true surf and turf. A little grated horseradish stops the whole affair from tipping over into cloying.
There are slices of venison which are a perfect bloody pink at the eye, and roast potatoes that demand your attention. At the end there is an Orkney fudge cheesecake, which are surely three words that belong together. We are told it is made by the Kitchen’s general manager, that she often makes the dessert of the day. As we’re leaving we thank her for it and she blushes. The Kitchen does what a good restaurant should do: it really does send you out feeling better about the world than when you went in, possibly helped by a list of utilitarian wines most of which are available by the glass and half carafe.
The Boath House’s Michelin announcement makes it clear they think the economic model didn’t work for them. Having eaten there I think the problem is more profound. They’ve lost sight of hospitality. After my visit we asked if we could photograph the dishes I’d ordered, as we always do. They refused and sent through their own, but only of half the things we had eaten. Feast instead on images of the cooking at the Kitchen. If you visit Inverness, that’s what you’ll want to be eating anyway.
Jay’s news bites
• The Peach Tree and its siblings in Shrewsbury – it is three interconnected restaurants – does the same sort of job as the Kitchen in Inverness. It knocks out big platefuls of diverting food, without standing on ceremony. Belly pork comes with dauphinoise and an apple and cider jus, the roast chicken with a grain mustard sauce (thepeachtree.co.uk).
• Forza Win, the ramshackle, communal dining experience in an old grainstore in Peckham, London, is changing format. Instead of selling tickets, the site will now be open for bookings and walk-ins. The opening menu includes clams with garlic and chilli, sea bass with braised lentils and ’nduja-stuffed roast chicken to share (forzawin.com).
• If you’re on the A9 to Inverness do pull off at the outrageous shopping extravaganza that is the House of Bruar. Hated by any cultured, cerebral Scot for its reliance on tartan, sandstone otters and statues of stags on hillsides, it does have a brilliant (if pricey) food hall, and knocks outa very good scone (houseofbruar.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
