The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Country restaurant Proof that playing to the audience needn’t mean diluting your product
THE SORN INN
YOU know you’re at a country inn on a wet winter’s night when the table right next to you is full of duck hunters. Duck hunters? In Scotland? Do our ducks even fly? Anyway, these hunters are all tweedy breeks and long woolly socks, their high boots left at the front door and faces ruddy from splashing about in the flooded countryside. We’ve just moved seats from the chop house next door because the language through there had been a little bit country. Couthy, even.
I don’t have a problem with that. I’m often guilty of it myself. I had been quite enjoying eavesdropping the lurid tale from a table nearby but then I remembered who I was with. And that an 11-year-old’s ears can swivel to pick up a conversation round three corners, up some stairs, even 100 yards away. Especially if it concerns a) Christmas presents or b) sweary words. And they weren’t talking about presents.
So we moved through here to talk about the weather, share a disk of sweet, tender confit beef with a crisp black pudding slice in a smoked onion veloute. To crunch huge black pudding beignets while our neighbours wonder about where all the ducks have gone tonight – Kelvingrove Park, possibly – and the excellent waiter charms my son with some top football chat about Ronaldo and the island of Madeira.
By the time the Shetland salmon with crab dumplings, pickled grilled cucumber, crushed potatoes and dill mayonnaise arrives I’ve had a chance to look round. It’s years since I’ve been to the Sorn Inn and back then it was a full-blown fine dining restaurant. Tonight half the tables are set with white linen, the others are bare topped – a bit pubby. Is this some cunning country metaphor?
Many people seem to be eating steaks; others, like us, are eating from the a la carte. And there’s now, of course, a chop house through the wall. That earlier chop house chat? Me: “Chop house? Um, I don’t see the chops on the menu.” Waiter: “Yes, sir. When we say chop we mean steak.”
Back to the main courses, then. Black pudding and panko-crumbed chicken supreme with, wait for it, macaroni cheese and thyme jus. Unusual? Actually the macaroni cheese is lovely, with a hint of blue maybe, and the chicken moist and crisp. I’m not entirely sure about the flavour of the crisp panko crumb but there’s no denying that with the sweet jus, dotted with fine green beans, it’s a pleasant dish.
As for that salmon? The crab dumplings are little gnocchi – light, delicate, tasty – and the potatoes lemony. Almost everything on the plate, and there’s a lot on it, has flavour. Only the salmon, a slow-cooked fillet, is a little dull and dry tasting.
It turns out, incidentally, as the conversation continues, that I know one of the duck hunters. And most of them are lawyers. I’ve never tasted wild duck and have half a mind to try it some time, but then I realise Luca has radared into the chat and is a now expressing an 11-year-old boy’s interest in blasting things – and that ain’t ever going to happen.
Moving swiftly on. We have before us now an apple crumble baked alaska. It’s filo pastry, wrapped around apple and cinnamon and topped with a layer of crunchy stuff, then ice-cream and the whole thing covered in meringue and fired.