Before you start reading what follows, please turn to AA Gill’s restaurant review in the Style section and check he is still in one piece.
He has been in some danger this week. I’m not sure there is a collective noun for a mob of angry Scottish chefs (a Ramsay, perhaps), but there should be. One can imagine them now, Sabatiers glinting in the autumn sun, chasing a smoking-jacketed food critic southwards towards the border. His offence? To suggest in last week’s Sunday Times that Scotland is “the worst country in Europe to eat out in – or the worst country that didn’t once have a communist dictator”.
“Outside the central belt and half a dozen heritage hotels, food is a sickly disaster for the Scots,” Gill declared. “They die younger, not just because of the cholesterol, but because, in the end, they can’t face another dinner.”
Unsurprisingly, this ruffled the odd feather. Andrew Fairlie, who this week won the AA’s Chef Of The Year Award for work at his restaurant at Gleneagles, described Gill’s remarks as “a little extreme”. Nick Nairn went further. “AA Gill is a snob,” he said. “I am pretty hard on the Scottish diet, restaurants and the Scottish consumer, but the out-of-hand, nasty, demeaning tone of his language is incredibly unhelpful.”
It is easy to quibble with Gill. The national cholesterol problem is indisputable but “the horrible dreich litany of lumpy tinned soup in a mug and filled rolls that are like eating Travelodge pillows studded with gravel and autopsy slurry”, which Gill complains about in Scotland, does not magically disappear on reaching Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Having grown up in estuary Essex – the Fife of England, but without the picturesque relief of Anstruther and Pittenweem – I find it hard to find a Tunnock’s teacake wafer of difference between the dog burgers and plastic pizzas of Basildon and those served in Glenrothes. And do English visitors to Little Chef really attack their “stinking detritus” (as AA described it) with any more or less “concentrated gusto” than their Scottish counterparts? It seems unlikely. But does this mean Gill’s wrong? Sadly no, and no amount of chest-beating nationalistic denials will alter that fact.
As a visitor, Gill had it easy. Those of us who actually live outside the central belt can be forgiven for thinking we have entered the culinary country that time forgot. Moving to my new home from Edinburgh has many compensations but grub is not among them. In case anybody thinks I’m picking on the southwest, I’m not.
In the Highlands and Islands, the towns are the worst offenders. Few experiences are grimmer for a tourist or business traveller than having to stay the night in a Stornoway hotel but realising that you also have to eat in the town is one of them. From experience, I recommend taking a supply of oatcakes.
Skye boasts the excellent Three Chimneys, Kinloch Lodge and Stein Inn, but its “capital”, Portree, is distinguished only by the pricy fish joints by the harbour.
That pattern is repeated throughout the country with honourable exceptions. From Gretna to Thurso, Fort William to Arbroath, in the tourist hotels by the banks of Loch Lomond, and on the shores of Loch Ness, the food that predominates is bland and rootless. If AA Gill exaggerates when he writes that “finding a scallop or a fresh herring on the menu is like trying to go dogging in Riyadh”, the point he makes is still valid.
Too often – even at the more ambitious establishments — affectation masquerades as innovation. I still recall with a mixture of bemusement and horror the Borders spa hotel which served lamb and kiwi fruit on the same plate.
Another national obsession is the ubiquitous “jus” in all its varieties (redcurrant, blackcurrant, port wine, balsamic and lingonberry, the list is almost limitless). In Scotland’s culinary lexicon, “jus” on a menu is designed to confer any food with a frisson of cosmopolitan chic, no matter how gloopily, rich, heavy and overpowering the sauce is. However, there are mitigating factors. In the Highlands in particular, the short tourist season and difficulties of attracting qualified staff encourage many hoteliers and restaurateurs to play safe and stock the freezer.
AA Gill has been knocked for being negative, so here are three positive things that might make eating out outside the cities a more rewarding experience. First, Scotland needs somebody to do for pub and hotel food what Jamie Oliver does for school meals. In London and the southeast, the term “gastropub” has become, if not a dirty word, then at least a quaint 1990s throwback, devalued by over-use. But in Scotland the gastropub revolution never really took place.
Second, the executive should look at why it’s often so hard to find local food in areas where it’s actually produced. If that means providing incentives for farmers to supply small quantities of their produce locally or waving a big stick at the supermarkets to make them use more local suppliers, so be it.
Third – and perhaps most importantly – we have to find ways to encourage the people who are trying to change the culinary landscape. That doesn’t mean celebrating just the glossy country hotels but also the places that provide simple home-made food made with love and care.
They are just as important in changing the culinary landscape as the Michelin-star brigade. Vote with your feet and wallet. A new set of awards to recognise such places wouldn’t go amiss either.
Will any of this make Scotland one of the best countries in Europe to eat out in? Perhaps not. But if the only alternative is a collective sulk over AA Gill and pretending nothing’s wrong, it’s worth a try.
