A Kylesku surprise

Well, this is a bit of a long one. What can I tell you? There's a lot to say!

The Kylesku Hotel is a place we know well. I've talked about it before and it has the happy distinction of being the only eaterie I can think of that gets just that little bit more awesome every time we visit. We've developed a fairly comfortable relationship with the place - after visiting a couple of times a year for the past decade and a half we recognise some of the staff (they don't recognise us - but that's hardly surprising, they see hundreds of different customers a week and besides, we're not that remarkable...) and even have a favourite table.

Well, we had a favourite table.

As indicated at the end of last week's edition, after discovering that Lochinver was mostly closed we headed north in the sure and certain knowledge that there would be no surprises at the The Kylesku Hotel. We were wrong.

As I've mentioned before the hotel sits just off the main road north, next to what used to be the slipway for the Kylesku Ferry before that service was replaced by the elegant arc of concrete which now carries the road across the narrows and onward to the north coast. Turning down what is now the dead end spur that leads to the hotel we were met with a building site. Essentially the whole building looked like it was being rebuilt.

This gave us a moment's pause - after all, it was lunch o'clock and for us that's the most important time of the day. We'd already discovered that all the places we'd been looking forward to eating at in Lochinver were closed - was Kylesku going to let us down too? With some trepidation we made our way quickly (it was chucking it down) along the front of the building to the steps that lead up to the bar praying silently that we weren't going to have to make an empty stomached trip back to Grummore.

We should have known better. The Kylesku Hotel has never let us down - why would it start now?

It was still a surprise though.

The carpet had gone, replaced by sleek hardwood floors. The rustic stripped pine tables which always looked as though they'd been salvaged from a farmhouse kitchen where they'd been loved by generations were gone too, replaced by crisper, paler, slightly more Terrance Conran style furniture, although some of the chairs were still the old green upholstered dark wood. I suspect they'll all be white in due course. The colour scheme lived in my memory as sort of cream and green. Now it's various shades of pebble grey with the odd brightly coloured "accent" wall.

Visually it's one hell of a change, but I rather liked it. It's perhaps a little less cosy, but it's lighter, brighter and very pleasant indeed. Well, take a look:

They also kept the old ship's wheel on the bar...

Oh, and we have a new favourite table:

Look at that view. Just LOOK at it!

The windows are now much bigger, which also goes a long way to making the place seem brighter, and I should be clear that the picture to the left doesn't even begin to do justice to the view down Loch Dubh.

We could have sat there for hours. In fact, we did. Twice, because we went back later in the holiday. To avoid confusion and repetition I'll talk about both visits at once.

On both occasions we were greeted by the very genial Mark, who I think in a previous blog I believe I described as looking as though he "could have stepped straight off Bondai Beach". He still does, and his cheerful friendliness always makes the room light up a little bit.

He brought the menus and explained which of the dishes listed on the specials menu were no longer available. We both elected to start with the potted lamb. I was expecting a sort of cold pate affair, along the lines of the potted beef we're so fond of in Yorkshire, but what we got was this:

It was delicious.

The lamb was served warm, and had clearly been cooked down over a very long time indeed. It was served with griddled bread and, on the first occasion, a celeriac and grain mustard coleslaw. On the second occasion, pictured above (because you're damn right we had it the second time we went too) a celeriac and caper coleslaw.

Personally I preferred the mustardy coleslaw, but since both were excellent, that's by the by.

It was warm, rich, perfectly seasoned and had a flavour so deep there was practically an echo. On a cold, wet, slate grey day it was the perfect comfort food - sort of distilled stew. We loved it so much on our second visit we asked our server if she'd ask the chef for the recipe. She told us with a smile and a twinkle that the chef "never reveals her secrets". I can't say I blame her. If I knew how to make something that perfect I wouldn't tell anybody either.

We'd arrived fairly early on that first visit and had been the first customers. We were in the middle of this unbelievable festival of flavour when the next customer arrived. It didn't occur to me to ask his permission to write about him, so I won't mention the name of this excellent old gentleman, although any regular of the Kylesku Hotel will doubtless know who I'm talking about, because he's something of a fixture.

We'd met him once before, on a previous visit when he'd regaled us with tales of his childhood around Loch Dubh during the war when his father had almost shot one of the top secret midget submarines that trained there after mistaking it for a seal. He sat down to his lunch of Loch Dubh spineys (think small languostines) just as our main courses were arriving, after dispatching Mark to collect a terracotta bust (actually he said "I've got a head in the boot of my car - could you go and get it for me?") which I believe is now displayed in a position of honour in the hotel.

Convivial as he was, when his spineys arrived he directed his full attention to his meal - as is only right. We did too. On that first visit I'd opted for the "Burger of the Day" (yes, I know, no shocks there) and Mrs Snail had gone for an old favourite, the Beetroot and Goat's Cheese Salad.

I won.

On our first visit of the trip the "Burger of the day" was a "Moroccan Lamb Burger" and it was utterly magnificent. I'm wishing I'd taken a picture because it was unutterably beautiful to look at. It was even better to eat. The Lamb patty was juicy, moist and wonderfully seasoned with spices that frankly I didn't recognise but really wanted to get to know better. The chips were, as in the past, about as close to perfect at it is possible for a chip to be - fat, golden and crispy on the outside, white, fluffy and steaming on the inside. There may have been salad. We don't speak of such things here.

Mrs Snail's Beetroot and goat's cheese salad looked amazing - there was more than one colour of beetroot on display which made the plate look exuberant rather than a charnel house - but it was also clear that the cheese did very much belong to the goat, and the goat was less than keen on sharing. There was not a lot of goat's cheese, is what we're saying. Indeed, the shortage was so severe that I didn't get to taste any, which means I only have Mrs Snail's word for the fact that in combination with the beets the effect of the breaded deep fried (we're still in Scotland, food lovers...)* nuggets of goat's cheese was exploseively good.

She wouldn't lie to me though - and if your only criticism of a meal is that you didn't get enough of it, that speaks pretty well of the food...

Our second foray to Kylesku was about a week later. As you already know, we both went for the insanely wonderful potted lamb as our starter, but we like to experiment, so our main choices were different.

Well, alright, I toyed with going for the burger of the day again, but the jovial and omnipresent Mark begged to make a recommendation. "Try the haunch of Venison," he suggested, "they serve it just pink, which is the only way to have it!" Well, you can't move in thois part of the Highlands for red deer, and they look not only magnificent, but also tasty, so how could I resist? Mrs Snail, who lacks my appetite for dead things, opted to try the cheese platter - normally a dessert - as her main. We ordered and settled back to watch the oyster catchers mince their way up and down the slipway, while a pair of herring gulls harrased the prawns that were swimming near the shore.

After a surprisingly short while our server - whose name I never quite got, I think it may have been "Elle" or "Ellie", whatever she was called, she was wonderful - brought our meals out to us. Just take a second and look at this:

I mean, where do I start?!

Haunch of Venison, some kind of braised greens (the menu told me what they were but all I can remember is that they were nice), mashed neeps, straw chips and dots of different vegetable purees, with a potato an haggis dauphinouse.

It really shouldn't have worked. Cheesy potatoes with haggis in them? With Venison? Really?

YES!

I guess many readers have not eaten venison. Let me explain. Imagine the finest beef fillet you have ever eaten.  Times that experience by three. That's bog standard venison. This though. Take your bog standard venison, multiply it by pi, add on your birthday than stick on a few more noughts. It was astounding. The bitterness of the braised greens and the sweetness of the neeps counterpointed each other, and the haggis dauphinouse was, well, interesting.

I know what's in haggis. Essentially, it's all the bits of a sheep you really wouldn't eat, minced up with oatmeal and shoved into a sheeps guts. In spite of that, I rather like it - so long as it's made to be crispy, something that the traditional steaming cannot do, and something that is never going to happen if you put it in a dauphinouse. Essentially, on paper, it's a bloody stupid idea.

And yet it worked.

Brilliantly.

The whole plate just came together to become the best meal I have had in some time. It was thge kind of meal you hated to finish. The kind of meal you wanted to be hungry enough to eat again. The kind of meal that makes you wish you were an Michelin inspector so that you could give the place a couple of stars. That good. I'm just going to go on record and suggest that any chef that can put those elements on a plate and make it work is a flat out genius.

By way of contrast Mrs Snail was somewhat less overwhelmed by her Cheese and Biscuits which seemed a little peremptory - three slabs of cheese with a couple of oatcakes, three grapes and a sort of onion marmalade sort of thing which jst didn't pack the pickly punch that a chutney would have provided. This is not a complaint (yes I know, it sounds a lot like one, but honestly it's just when everything is so good the little things that aren't quite perfect really stand out) as such, and although this was a bit of a low point in the culinary experience, the platter had an unexpected saving grace that made even the low point pretty darn high.

Did I mention that their chef was a genius and their waiting staff are awesome?

Well, I'm going to say it again.

Sitting quietly in the centre of the Cheese and Biscuit platter were three little balls of sesame seeds. Mrs Snail nibbled tentatively and then very quckly ate the whole thing - her expression melting into something approaching delighted content. She passed one of them to me and insisted that I try it.

It was amazing. We've christened these nectareous** nuggets of noshableness "sesame brittle", but in fact they were not quite crunchy and not quite chewey, but somewhere rather fascinatingly in-between. They were also sweet but not too sweet, with that nutty toasted sesame flavour that is almost but not quite bitter. They were so good that when our server came over to see if we wanted anything else, we asked for a bowlful, which she very generously provided. Told you the waiting staff were awesome!

On that second visit we skipped dessert - we were in a bit more of a hurry and settled for the sesame brittle balls. On our first visit the weather was so uninviting we did stick around for a third course. I went for their tablet ice-cream, while Mrs Snail went for a Pear tarte tatin with poppy seed syrup.

People who haven't spent much time in Scotland may be unfamiliar with Tablet. Mrs Snail, who doesn't really have a sweet tooth, once described it as "gritty fudge", but to me it is the finest of confections. It is sort of fudge like, but drier and crumblier. It is also outrageously sweet. My two scoops of vanilla ice-cream were loaded with huge nuggets of the stuff. It was heavenly, but it was Mrs Snails tarte tatin that was the real star.

I confess I was intrigued by the "poppy seed syrup". So far as I was aware the only syrup you're going to get from a poppy seed is opium - which would be an innovative approach to ensuring repeat custom, but I'm guessing it would also attract entirely the wrong clientele. The tarte was just about the right size, just the right texture and actually tasted of pear rather than suger. The syrup was not in fact opium, but a regular suger syrup with poppy seeds in it. They seemed to be a strange addition but they did add an interesting flavour and another layer of texture to the dish. The tarte is supposed to be accompanied with a scoop of Run and Raisin Ice-Cream. I have no idea whether that would have worked, because both Mrs Snail and myself regard Run and Raisin as an abomination so she asked if they would kindly swap it for pouring cream, which worked brilliantly.

And that's the all new Kylesku Hotel. It still gets better every time we visit.

Ultimately I think that the wonderful old regular said it best when he told us "The only thing you can do at the Kylesku is start at the top of the menu and work your way down."

He wasn't wrong.






Postscript:

I loathe prawns in all their forms. Mrs Snail adores them, but now suffers from the kind of allergy to them that makes your lips turn blue and inflates your tongue like a balloon. This is why neither of us ordered what I maintain is the hotel's most spectacular dish - a platoon of langoustines skewered on what is basically a sword which hangs, Damocles like, above a dish of garlic butter. I'm please to report that on our second visit I observed a fellow diner being served with this insanely cool seafood sensation. I'm pleased to see that it's still on the menu and that the presentation has not changed. I'd love to show you a picture of it, but I balked at invading a person's privacy to ask if I could photograph their lunch. If anyone from the hotel is reading this and wants to post a picture in the comments I'd be most grateful...


*Sorry. I do love a good stereotype. And I have visited the chippie in Stonehaven that claims to have invented the deep fried Mars Bar, so it's not like I haven't seen evidence for the idea that the Scots will deep fry anything.

**Sorry again. I wantedto use alliteration so I asked my Facebook friends for a synonym for "delicious" beginning with "N". They have a wide vocabulary, my Facebook friends...

What to do when the whole town is closed!

Long time readers of this Blog will know the special place that Lochinver, the little fishing town at the heart of Assynt in the north West Highlands, holds a very special place in the hearts of myself and Mrs Snail. This was the place that first introduced us to the wonders of the far north of Scotland, indeed this was the place that caused us to buy the Road Snail in the first place, when we decided that we just couldn't afford to keep renting self catering accomodation if we were going to visit as often a we wanted to.

So, on Tuesday 31st March 2015 - the day before I sat in a hail straffed caravan and wrote last weeks post - we set out under gloomy skies and headed west, out of Strathnaver and towards Assynt. By the time we were halfway to Lairg, the snow was plastering itself against the windscreen and sitting an inch thick on the apparantly untreated roads. By the time we'd dropped down towards Loch Shin and begun the approach to Lairg the snow had largely turned to sleet and rain though, so we plodded on regardless.

I'll not bore you with a long winded description of the journey. It was windy, cold, and when it wasn't snowing it was either hail, sleet or rain. Had we been walking or cycling it would have been utterly, utterly miserable. fortunately we were safely ensconsced in the warmth and comfort of our trustworthy Renault Koleos, so we were perfectly fine - it's just that the view was nothing to write home about, so I won't.

Before too long we were skirting the shores if Loch Assynt and then dropping down into the familiar surroundings of Lochinver itself.

I've talked about Lochinver before and to be honest, it hasn't changed much since the last time I posted about it. It is, without question, one of our very favourite places, but on this particular day I must confess only its mother could have loved it. Under a sullen, slate grey sky we drove down the main (and pretty much only) street, and out to the end of the harbour. We were pleased to see that there were a couple of fishing boats in, but no sign of the massive European boats that we used to see so aften in the mind nineties.

It's tragic really. I remember on my first visit to this little fishing town about twenty years ago, I walked down to the huge hanger like building on the dockside late one evening with my father in law and watched as hundreds, maybe thousands of white plastic crates laden to the brim with ice and all manner of fresh fish were unloaded from the boats, auctioned by a man in white wellies, and then loaed into a fleet of refrigerated lorries and whisked away to restaurants, supermarkets and high end fishmongers.

In those days you would see maybe a dozen massive fishing vessels, and any number of smaller local boats a week. These days? Not so much. The massive beige and brown hanger sized unloading shed is still there, but it doesn't seem to get much action these days. It seems that tourism is the town's major industry these days, but even that seemed to be hibernating.

As we'd driven down the main street we'd already noticed that the Assynt Visitor Centre was closed, which came as a disappointment because we'd been hoping to talk to the always knowledgable staff about Eagle sightings and the status of Lochinver's famous Heronry. Culag Woods, on the southern shores of Lochinver are home to one of the largest Heronries in Europe, and the sight of the incongruously majestic birds returning to their treetop nests in the breeding season is noting short of gobsmacking. As it was, we were just going to have to muddle along ourselves, and as the rain came down hard again, we agreed that descretion was the better part of valour and decided against sloshing our way through a woodland walk to go and look for them.

Besides, "lunch o'clock" was rapidly approaching and we had our sights set on a couple of new eateries that had sprung up since our last visit to the heart of Assynt.

Given that we were at the Culag end of the harbour, we furst turned our attention to Peet's. This restaurant opened in 2014, and having given it the once over online, we thought it looked pretty good. However, it also looked pretty closed. On further investigation we discovered that it had been operating as an evening take away only, and that lunch and dinner service would recommence on...

...1st April 2015.

We were a day early. Dammit. Because if the website is even half way accurate, Peet's looks pretty good!

Still, "Nil Desperandum" and all that. To be honest, I wasn't all that disappointed. I'd been keen to investigate Peet's, but there was another "new kid on the block" that I was even keener to try.

You see, the best meal I have ever eaten was in Lochinver, at the very, very fine Albannach Hotel. At the time, I remember commenting that the place deserved a Michelin Star. Well, now it has one and the proprioters have branched out and taken over The Caberfeidh pub, which stands at the western end of the main street, turning it into a "dining pub". We've been keen to try the place since we first heard about it, so we turned the car around and headed back into town.

We were to be disappointed.

Peering through the windows we found The Caberfeidh to be a warm and inviting looking place. But it was also shut. Open for lunch only on thursday, friday, saturday and sunday lunchtimes. We were either a day late of a few days too early. However good it looked (and it did) we weren't getting fed.

Regular readers will know that lunch is pretty damned important, and so we were left with limited options. Our timing was terrible and our next most favoured option  - buying some stuff for a picnic and finding a pretty spot (of which the area is more than well endowed) to eat it in - was ruled out by the ever worsening weather.

So. What to do?

Well, one of the things we really love about Assynt is the magnificent sense of isolation. The other is that dotted through the gloriously empty mountains and moorland is a disproportionately large number of spectacularly good places to eat. All we had to do was move on to another one.

Thus it was that we carried on, back out of Lochinver, back along the shores of Loch Assynt to the main road north, where we turned off and headed towards the Kylesku hotel - another of our favourite haunts. There we knew there would be a warm welcome, a crackling wood fire and some absolutely top notch food. Oh yes, we knew there'd be no surprises there.

Turns out we were wrong about that too...

A Highland Spring.

Hello! Long time no see! I'm thinking of this a "Road Snail season three", and hopefully we'll be weekly from now on...

At Snail Towers we have a mantra. "Never go to Scotland for the weather." Which is why, as I write this, I am not in the least bit perturbed that my view looks like this:

Spring in the Highlands...

It's April 1st and here on our lochside pitch at the Caravan Club's Altnaharra/Grummore site we're experiencing rather a lot of weather. In fact I rather suspect we're getting pretty much all the weather...

Anyway. The point is that Bonnie Scotland is not always the warmest or driest of holiday destinations, especially if  you head, as we generally do, for the northern highlands. What never ever fails to be however, is spectacular! I mean, just look at this for a second:

Stunning, isn't it?

So, I imagine that we'll be doing a lot of getting about and about over the next two weeks - we spent some time yesterday on a snowy west coast, which I'll tell you about in a future posting, and we have plans to hit the east coast tomorrow.

Right now though, the horizontal snow and hail against the 'van sounds like a perpetual fall of ball bearings (not even small ball bearings, mind you) while we are being rocked by what I know from my experience filling the water barrel earlier is a bitingly cold gale force wind. Frankly venturing out is a less than attractive proposition, which is why I'm spending my afternoon at the keyboard pondering the questions that always arise when I think about caravan life.

For instance, why do some people travel with their caravan blinds down? Myself and Mrs Snail have made a bit of a study of this, and roughly half the caravans we see on the road have their blinds drawn, the other half (to which we belong) travel with them open. Now. travelling with them open was never a concious choice - it simply never occured to us to close them before setting off. Presumably, unless they set off in the middle of the night, those who travel with blinds down must have deliberately decided to do so.

Are they carrying top secret cargo they don't want anyone else to see? Is their upholstery particularly susceptable to fading? It may sound as though I'm taking the micky, but I'm really not. If there's a reason to do it I'd love to know what it is!

Then there's the perplexing question of why everyone elses' caravans are so clean. I wash my caravan with reasonable regularity but let's be honest, it's a bit of a chore and frankly life is too short to worry about it too much. as a result some of the hard to get to areas, like the TV ariel, have gathered a bit of muck. In addition, even when we set out with a spotlessly clean unit, by the time we reach our destination we've picked up the usual detritus of the road - splashes of oil, dust, road salt and so on.

And yet, when we arrived at the Caravan Club's site at Bunree - our usual staging post on the way up here to the northern highlands - all the other caravans seemed to be spotless. How? They must have driven up some of the same roads we did. Why were we covered in a thin layer of grime while some of them shone so brightly they were literally hurting my eyes. There is clearly a secret here, and if any of you out there are privy to it I'd be most grateful if you'd share!

Oh, and while I'm on the subject - why are bits constantly dropping off? The Road Snail herself is a Lunar Quasar 462. She's relatively new - bought in 2007, and well maintained. And yet things keep breaking loose. Now, obviously, the nature of a touring caravan is to be dragged up hill and down dale, and in our case, along narrow twisty roads that are not particularly always well maintained. Our caravan's travelling life is one of shake, rattle and roll. This is bound to cause screws to loosen, which is why one of the first things we do on arrival anywhere is to tighten a few things up.

However. Caravan manufacturers surely understand that this will be the case - they put wheels on the damn things after all, they must be accepting that their products will be doing some rolling about! Why then does the front of our fire keep dropping off? Is it really beyond the wit of man to design a caravan heater that stays where it's put when the caravan itself moves from A to B? We can put men on The Moon and robotic explorers on Mars but we can't do that?

Really?

Why have the lenses fallen off both my front running lights? Again, I'll accept the 'van might've been shaken about a bit on the way up here, but bits don't fall off the car in the same way. Are caravans inherently weak? Is this a clever conspiracy to flog us more spare parts? I have no idea, but it's bloody irritating!

Still, the 'van is shaking rather less than it was twenty minutes ago, and the ball bearings have abated somewhat, so I think I'll put the laptop away and see if I can spot an eagle - or at least a buzzard. Have a good week - I hope to see you here again next friday!