BEING the owner of some really rather rubbish apple trees and some recently deceased pear trees (thanks Lidl), to me the Highland seaside village of Cromarty is a revelation. Behind the forbidding high walls that seem to guard every garden here, trees bend and sway tantalisingly with an astonishing weight of ripe but wholly off-limits fruit.
From where we sit in this restaurant – enclosed in a strange little wooden booth, it too walled-off but from the rest of the restaurant – we can actually see even more apples and pears drooping over the wall just across the road. I slip out and pace the wall looking up hungrily and wondering if I stood on Number Two son would I be able to reach them? Damn, he’s too skinny.
Never mind – a freshly made apple pie must surely be on the lunch menu. A pear crumble, perhaps. I would ask the smiley, cheery, bustling woman whose personality is stamped all over Sutor Creek but she moves too fast. She had told us earlier, in passing, that the pretty, glazed bun-style rolls that came with the fishy, smoky Cullen skink were not bought in. “If it’s on the blackboard we make it here,” she added. Alas I see no pies or crumbles on there, just the usual dessert suspects made with chocolate, lemon, caramel cream, though there is plum compote mentioned and raspberry in the cranachan.
Not to worry. A good, tart apple sauce accompanies my juicy, tasty and moist Sunday roast pork. There’s a square of crisp golden crackling too; proper crispy, floury potatoes tasting deliciously of the dripping they were cooked in; lovely roasted carrots; and (probably unnecessary) broccoli and peas. Oh, and a nice sweet red cabbage which I would defy anyone to finish.
Earlier, when Luca and I came back from gaping at the rows of oil-drilling platforms marching majestically down the sound, Debs was unpacking a tall thin kilner jar of sweet, buttery potted shrimp on to a wooden board. I couldn’t help notice while enjoying a forkful or two that the board was shaped like one of those pears outside. Between taking sips of a piping hot and robust leek and potato soup I nip up to the kitchen area to get a swatch at what’s said to be the only wood-fired pizza oven in the Highlands. I can see the pizza man working away, a tub of risen dough beside him, but the oven is tantalisingly just out of view. If I go towards the toilet and peer past the chefs in their long narrow kitchen I can also see wooden batons being loaded into a firebox below the oven and hear a crackle and roar, but not inside the oven itself. As they’re too busy to be pestered with daft questions I’ll assume the pizza is not cooked alongside the burning wood. And it’s not the normal Italian pizza-oven design, yet the pizza when it comes is mottled like a tattie scone on the base, crisp yet chewy and made with a dough that’s deliciously yeasty and properly seasoned. If it tastes unusual, it also tastes good. So too does a beautiful steak of prime hake, creamy, sea fresh, crisped skin, sitting on crushed and pan-fried new potatoes, served with fennel that has a light orange tang.
I know. You’re spotting an unusual mix of cooking styles here. Those are pizza boxes stacked on the counter. Alongside orangey fennel and hake? Robust roasts and soups? In fact the desserts are borderline Masterchef-y. We finish with a cranachan which is fashionably – or perhaps nowadays unfashionably – deconstructed into separates of cream, raspberries and toasted oats. Reconstructed, in the mouth, it is lovely.
A curious place is Sutor Creek, not just the awkward booth-style layout, the eclectic style of decoration, but in the way it spans so many styles. Does it matter? No. Because the food is very good. But could somebody please go out and do something with all that bloody fruit?
Sutor Creek
21 Bank Street, Cromarty (sutorcreek.co.uk, 01381 600855)
Menu: There’s fresh fish, roast lunches and even pizza from a wood-fired oven. Pretty much what you want from a Highland restaurant. 4/5
Atmosphere: Part cafe, part restaurant, part art gallery partitioned into odd and occasionally uncomfortable wooden booths. Good views. 4/5
Service: Mobbed for Sunday lunch yet the staff still managed to smile throughout. While they don’t have time to chat, who could blame them? 5/5
Price: Seafood in the Highlands? They know what it’s worth. We paid £9 for the potted shrimp, £15 for the hake. Reasonable enough. 4/5
Food: Fresh fish, very good pizzas and, fruit aside, top local sourcing with a great Sunday roast. It’s good stuff. 7/10
Total: 24/30
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