It's Scotland’s most remote restaurant, perched on a tiny Hebridean island measuring just two miles across. There are no cars on the island, which is home to just eighteen souls, and it can only be reached by sea, but people from all over the world happily brave the three-hour ferry ride or come by sailboat to eat the freshest seafood on the most westernmost of the Small Isles.
Owner and chef, Gareth Cole has written a book about award-winning Café Canna, in which he shares his love of seafood landed from the waters surrounding the island and seaweed foraged from its shores.
Cole, a keen sailor with his own 38-foot Sigma, fell in love with Canna on a visit with friends – so much so he gave up his web developer job in London and returned in 2018 for good when he spotted that the only café on the island was for sale.
Originally from Torphins in Aberdeenshire, Cole said: “It wasn’t the case of hating the big city and running away to an island, I just felt it was time for a new chapter. Now I go to London for leisure and live and work in the Scottish countryside.
READ MORE: Whisky distillery partners with Cirque du Soleil to mark 'momentous' milestone
“I didn’t plan on coming to Canna specifically when I decided I wanted to live somewhere more remote, preferably on the west coast but when I stopped here on the ferry for a few hours that was all the time it took to make the decision.”
While some people who attempt an island idyll give up and move back to the mainland, defeated by the weather and the isolation, Cole relishes life on Canna.
“I’m never stuck because I have my own boat and nip over to Skye or the other small islands when I want a change of scene, or we all jump in the boat and catch mackerel,” he said. “Canna is incredibly beautiful and unspoilt with white beaches, lovely hills and woodland. There’s a freedom to living here – I swim all year round in the sea and when I’m too hot in the kitchen I run over to a beach and jump in the water to cool off.”
There’s no doubt that opening a restaurant on a remote island presents challenges and Cole admits that working a season is “not for the faint-hearted”.
“There are three of us – me in the kitchen and two front-of-house as the core team – but often holidaymakers will find themselves at the dishwasher lending a hand.
“Running the only restaurant in such a place has a certain inherent calamity, but secretly I think we like it that way. We’re never quite sure what supplies the boat will deliver, which arrives at best once or twice weekly. We’ve had to do without basic stock many times, which is why we started our own brewery, to stop the bar running dry, and make our own Crowdie cheese and bread.”
The island, which is owned by the National Trust for Scotland, runs on renewable energy system operated by the community, and Cole can sometimes find himself cooking by candlelight when the power goes down.
“This fragile existence is a blessing as it has pushed us to be more self-reliant and interested in the fabulous produce sourced fresh and direct from our very own island. By necessity we make the most of island ingredients – we land seafood from our crystal waters just moments before it’s served, and meat comes from the island’s only farm, and vegetables from our plot.”
READ MORE: An 'exciting time' for Scotland as new generation achieves Michelin success
Cole finds that one of the best aspects of living on Canna is the small group of people who make up the population.
“I’ve been on Canna for six years now – long enough to say ‘aye’ on the inward rather than outward breath and to consider wellies desirable evening wear. There was a community meeting the day I got here, held in the shearing shed. It was the first time I’d sat down with the whole island, and I was the only one not wearing wellies. I realised these were the people I was about to start a new life with, and I’ve never looked back. I absolutely love it.”
The whole community is involved in producing the food served up in Café Canna.
“You’ll see the pots in the bay just outside our door from where the seafood is hauled by Peter and Craig. The meat comes from the cows and sheep grazing the fields around us, raised by Murdo, Gerry, Cazbo and Isebail, and from the rabbit man. Over the wall, Indi keeps the polytunnel, and Liz and Pete – who also plays the tunes of an evening – tend the vegetable patch and orchard,” added Cole, who also asked the resident artist to design his beer label.
“In times of need, many residents have worked in the restaurant, sometimes turning up for a nice drink and being plucked unawares into the kitchen. We’re all in it together.”
Cole did not train as a chef but was a keen amateur cook. After his first year on the island, he decided he needed professional skills and worked as a stagiaire – an intern in another chef’s kitchen – in a London restaurant, working his way up to sous chef. Armed with a better understanding of how to organise a kitchen and run a restaurant, he returned to Canna and has not looked back, winning the 2020 Food and Drink Award for most unique dining experience.
Read more: Most remote pub in mainland Scotland reopens after refurb
The restaurant is open throughout the summer months, from 20 April 2024 to September/October. The island can only be reached by sailing or private charter or by ferry, with sailings from Mallaig every day except Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s a stunning trip over the sea, with views over to Skye and the other Small Isles of Muck, Eigg and Rum, with sightings of white-tailed eagles, puffins, porpoises and whales.
Despite the difficulty of reaching the island, the 18-seat restaurant is usually packed all summer with people coming from as far away as the US and Europe for the unique experience – and for the food.
On any given day, Cole can be spotted foraging for razor clams and mussels, and for seaweed, and for wild edible plants such as gorse and wild garlic. He encourages people to do their own responsible foraging, and sometimes takes customers on impromptu seaweed foraging trips.
“Foraging is a real pleasure. Of all the areas to enjoy it, the shore is my firm favourite, even in the winter when you can get soaked. Abundant as it can seem, it’s vital to only take what you need and only then what will be sure to regrow,” said Cole, who also recommends searching for seaweed suppliers online.
There are many unusual recipes in this book that use seaweed to stuff, garnish, eat as salad or side, including smoked dulse butter to accompany lobster, sea spaghetti and dulse fritters, and kelp dashi miso ramen. Cole prizes seaweed for its tastiness and health properties.
“It would be well worth looking into the antioxidant, cholesterol-lowering, vitamin-boosting, blood-sugar-balancing, thyroid-fixing, fat-reducing properties of the stuff,” he said.
Dishes are also enhanced by wild flowers, including Wild Gorse Crème Brûlée and Sea Buckthorn Sorbet. There are tips on how to prepare seafood and recipes including Langoustine Toast – dreamt up when he was yearning for a Chinese take-away – and Crab Doughnuts. Carnivores can try his beef, Skye Black Ale and Blue Murder – a cheese not a crime – pie vegetarians Beetroot and Mushroom Bourguignon.
“I love experimenting with wonderful local ingredients and running the restaurant. I can’t see myself moving or doing anything else,” added Cole.
•Café Canna, Recipes from a Hebridean island, by Gareth Cole (Birlinn) comes out on March 7.
CAFÉ CANNA RECIPES
Smoked dulse butter
We serve this with chunky slices of home-made bread in the restaurant. Smoking the dulse increases its bacon-like savoury appeal, and, combined with sea salt and rich, lovely butter, it’s a joy to spread thickly and munch.
Ingredients:
20g dehydrated dulse, finely chopped or ground in a coffee grinder (this would be about 80g fresh)
2 tsp sea salt
50g good quality unsalted butter
First, combine the dulse flakes and salt in a large bowl. Cut the butter into two or three chunks then, one at a time, roll in the dulse mixture until thoroughly coated all over.
Langoustine (prawn) toast
In the restaurant, the staff’s chat regularly turns to what we are going to eat when we set foot on the mainland. A good (and sometimes bad) Chinese takeaway is always up there. The inspiration for this dish came from such a conversation.
If you can’t get fresh langoustines, you can substitute regular prawns.
Serves 4 as a starter
Ingredients:
200g langoustine meat, peeled and cleaned (roughly 800g whole langoustine)
1 garlic clove peeled
3g ginger, peeled
1 egg white
½ tsp castor sugar
1 tsp soy sauce
2 spring onions, roughly chopped
4 thick slices white bread, crusts removed (a great way to use slightly stale bread)
A few glugs sesame oil, for brushing
1 egg, lightly beaten with a fork
100g sesame seeds
Sunflower oil (or veg oil) for shallow frying
Sweet chilli sauce (optional) to serve
Whizz the prawns/langoustines, garlic, ginger, egg white, sugar, soy sauce and spring onions in a food processor or with a hand blender in a jar.
Brush one side of each slice of bread with sesame oil and spread the prawn mixture on top of that. A good thick slathering all the way to the edges. Brush the top and sides with the beaten egg then, over a plate, sprinkle with sesame seeds.
Heat the sunflower oil in a frying pan, place one or two slices in with the prawn side facing up until slightly browned then turn over and cook, prawn side down for a further 2-3 minutes.
Cut each slice in two diagonally and serve with soy or chilli sauce
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here