The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
William goes off the rails at The Station Kitchen in West Bay, Dorset
All aboard for a first-class dinner, says William
We’re dining on a train and going nowhere. The courses come and go but the view stays the same. This is what the plague has brought us to. The surreal experience of gazing at a redundant platform while sitting in a static train carriage. There is no engine, but neither is there meant to be. By West Bay in the Dorset seaside town of Bridport, a couple took a lease of the old station; one that, along with the railway line, was built in the 1850s and ran until it closed in 1975. Then they bought an old carriage that had a previous life as a hospital coach in the First World War. They found some old track and parked it at the station, then opened it as a restaurant.
Today, the romance of dining on trains is dead and as I write, on a train as it happens, there isn’t even a trolley service. Now the Great Western Railway adventure is a torturously overlit carriage and patrols to check you have a mask on. Once, the joy of dining on trains was the blissful thought that you could browse and sluice while actually getting somewhere. Now that prospect is gone – and it has been a slow, agonising process from great to grotty to gone – all that’s left is the prospect of dinner at The Station Kitchen in Bridport. And so you drive there and get on a train that takes you nowhere. Our ancestors would be scratching their heads.
Fortunately the owners of The Station Kitchen – front of house Ross and chef Claire, who also run a catering business called Sausage & Pear – take inspiration not from old British Rail menus, but from the produce of the Dorset coast. And they serve it in a train carriage decorated with furniture and trinkets no doubt collected on trips to auction houses and antiques markets. So the walls are festooned with huge clocks, an enormous ampersand, large pieces of metal (a 4ft-tall industrial iron thing is bolted to the floor in the middle of the carriage), fluffy baubles and twinkling lights. Candleholders are large pink flamingos and figurines, and the whole effect is utterly charming.
A decent bottle of picpoul de pinet arrived with a pair of cheesy scones, which was a cute treat. I started with scallops from Lyme Bay, without much trace of the promised ‘crispy Serrano ham’, but they were well cooked and came with a tart, chunky and nicely oily sauce vierge topped with pea shoots. My wife Emily relished her heirloom tomato salad with feta, loving the crunch of pistachio nuts and honeyed dressing. ‘I thought you didn’t like honey in dressing,’ I said. ‘I don’t when you do it,’ she replied.
I had a whole Cornish megrim sole, a deepwater flat fish more meaty in flavour than its posh Dover cousin. It came with a chunky tower of crushed potatoes, which could have enjoyed a little more seasoning, but the fish was cooked beautifully, slipping neatly off the bone and as gentle and tender as a good sole should be.
Emily worked her way through half a lobster, pleased with every morsel, but baffled by a redundant, giant onion ring. I tasted her fat, triple-cooked truffle and Parmesan chips, but could detect little sign of either the thrice-fry or the precious funghi and cheese. We ended with a request to tweak the affogato – opting for a double espresso poured over two naughty scoops of salted-caramel ice cream instead of vanilla.
The Station Kitchen is a happy place, with great service, and is a breath of fresh air, being devoid of screens or masks or temperature testing. A hundred years ago, a twohour dinner, a couple of hours’ kip – with a change at Maiden Newton – and we could have arrived at Paddington. Instead, we stepped off the train and on to the platform having sumptuously, deliciously and blissfully gone absolutely nowhere.