Food on a Friday: Autumn treats
Murray Chalmers revisits an old frustration, but he also gives us some great ideas for good food as temperatures start to drop.
Someone asked me last week to recommend a Dundee restaurant where she and her family could have a celebration dinner.
It pains me to say I couldn’t think of one.
There is literally nowhere great in this city to have dinner – meaning a proper meal, with wine, informed service and, most importantly, a seasonal menu of interesting food cooked on the premises.
I find this both shocking and frustrating, when you consider that Dundee is the fourth biggest city in Scotland, with a wealth of fine produce in the countryside around us.
In the end I suggested my friend take her family to the wonderful North Port. In Perth.
That’s a full 22 miles away, via the almost permanently road-worked A90.
I mention this because I was hoping to review a Dundee restaurant this week and, since I always start with the hope the review will be largely positive, the only place I could think of was the DCA, which at least has a buzzing, brasserie-type ambiance and seems to have a reasonably interesting, if variable, menu.
But I couldn’t get there in time to write this for today and, since nobody except fun-loving stop-outs wants food on a Friday served cold on a Saturday, a DCA dinner in Dundee will have to wait.
A tacit belief?
The hospitality industry is facing huge challenges around Scotland and the UK. There are many reasons for this: Brexit being one, the aftershock from the Covid pandemic being another.
But there’s an inherent, underlying problem in Dundee amongst the hospitality community, and that’s this tacit belief that everything concerning Dundee is great and must be hailed as such, especially publicly.
I wonder if this, too, hasn’t led to the mediocre, unimaginative offerings from so much of the hospitality industry in the city. It’s not the same in other places in Scotland facing similar challenges.
So, no single review this week but instead, a few things I’ve enjoyed, culinarily speaking, in the last month. Small bites, if you must….
Pacamara, Dundee
Pacamara is a great place to have breakfast, brunch and lunch, although I sometimes feel the menu needs a few lighter dishes to balance out the heft of the best brunch offerings.
A recent meeting there with fellow Scots Inker Rhoda Miller reminded me just how much this place gets it right – along with The Bach and Eastfield, Pacamara is a failsafe place to enjoy classic brunch dishes in buzzy, pleasant surroundings.
Prices are reasonable at around £8 for dishes including Columbian eggs, Bubble & Squeak Bennie and the now almost ubiquitous shakshuka.
My lunch dish of choice is the buttermilk fried chicken burger which was as delicious as ever, although the chicken portions seemed to be suffering from a little deflation, even pre-Budget. Coffee is good and service is friendly. What more do you want? Good stuff!
Company Bakery, Musselburgh
The best bread in Edinburgh is baked by the Palmerston and by Company Bakery and a recent trip to Company Bakery’s newish HQ in Musselburgh didn’t disappoint.
Open seven days a week, the bakery/café has a great selection of breads, pastries and cakes to enjoy in the handsome, Skandi-industrial space, or to take home.
Apart from the classic sourdough and its even superior seeded sister, I’d especially recommend the superlative cinnamon buns and the Welsh rarebit croissant, neatly combining two essential brunch dishes in one artery-clogging bundle of joy.
Served on a brown plate, the rarebit croissant might not LOOK so appealing but, trust me, man does not live on brown 1970s visuals alone.
As I commented at the time, no Kelly Hoppen taupe monochrome palette can hide the fact that this tastes bloody delicious – although I’d prefer more rarebit mouth-searing clag from a bit of oven heat next time.
I’d pretty much recommend anything from Company Bakery, and I also love their very enterprising Edinburgh bread delivery service.
And for those like me, who might feel Musselburgh is thousands of steps too far just to buy a loaf of bread at source – it isn’t, plus Company’s bread is stocked in various places across the city.
Archipelago, Edinburgh
Archipelago has been my local Edinburgh café for the last five years and has seen me through life’s dramas with a seemingly endless chai latte and a vegan miso brownie.
When I first moved into my flat round the corner in our capital city, it was the best surprise to find such a wonderful café so close.
Since The View in Wormit became more of a restaurant than a pub (even my mother, who could identify a rogue steak pie from the top of the Law Hill, was a fan), I’ve never really thought of anywhere as my local – but Archipelago is surely that most treasurable thing.
What makes it so special? It’s very hard to say, really. The coffee is good, the cakes are good, and it’s a lovely neighbourly atmosphere – I often see the same old guy having a solo lunch there and can easily envisage that contented figure being me in a few years or even weeks’ time (the passing of time gets more relative with a free bus pass). It’s charming.
The clack of a crochet hook…
In all honesty, the hot food might not be to everyone’s taste though. There’s a bit of a whiff of Cranks-era vegetarianism here, redolent of a time when Victoria Wood could satirise health food as being a nice butter bean whip, served in a bucket.
This obviously isn’t that but there’s a bit of a clack of the crochet hook about this kind of food and I have to say that’s something that appeals to me.
I don’t know if it’s the innate hippie buried in my resolutely punk veneer but I sometimes adore the blandness of brown rice and of vegetable stews cooked either just a little too mush or a little too little - the kind of food that comes from the time between root-veg radicalism and River Café grilled raddichio.
Every time I open the doors of Archipelago I feel a sense of surety, of safety, of a very New Town form of cossetting. Their cheese toastie is divine.
I love this place in the way I love my favourite cashmere scarf.
Food For Life Cookbook
Following on from the idea of knitting your own muesli, I have to recommend the Food for Life Cookbook, even though I’m quite a lot over the whole Zoe hype.
Zoe started as a niche thing where people could track their eating using a series of tools, most notably a continuous glucose monitoring system - most apparent to fellow disciples by the yellow patch on select people’s arms.
I did sign up to it quite early and found it beneficial, but the truth is I soon tired of the seemingly endless procession of posh birds (why do they all have that same clipped, rasping voice, like the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie trapped in a narrow concrete wind-tunnel with fellow Nepo babies) telling you endless ways to pimp a tin of chick- peas?
But still, the cookbook is the kind of thing that’s quite useful when you want to embrace a healthier lifestyle, if only a few times a week, although I have to say that I’ve tried a few recipes already and they’re either a bit after the fact or hugely underwhelming in the flavour stakes.
But, as above, sometimes you just want to suffer for your culinary sins and – as a dear friend of mine used to repeat when the dessert trolley appeared (back in the day when you were allowed to say such stuff) – my dear, food is good, thin is better!
A pint in Dun Brewing, Glenelg
A craft brewery set in the beautiful area of Glenelg in the Highlands. Two remarkably preserved Brochs to visit nearby. A pint of excellent beer, drunk either outside or in the ‘Dun Inn’ lounge bar – formerly a cow shed, now decorated with rustic furniture, a dartboard and a wood burning stove.
It was at this point I looked around and felt all was well with the world, which – judging by the state we’re in – was quite a moment.
Just lovely. A bit of a trek to get there but – in tune with the idea of 1970s health food and hippie values, no pain, no gain!
Pacamara, 305 Perth Road, Dundee, DD2 1AU. T: 01382 527666. Instagram: @pacamaradundee
Company Bakery, 6 Station Road, Eskmills, Musselburgh, EH21 7PE. www.companybakery.com
Archipelago Bakery, 39 Dundas St, Edinburgh, EH3 6QQ. T: 07932 462 715 www.archipeagobakery.co.uk
Dun Brewing, Corrary Farm, Glenelg, Kyle, IV40 8JX. www.dunbrewing.co.uk Instagram: @dunbrewing
Totally agree re nowhere to dine out in Dundee! The DCA is a fab place and good buzzy atmosphere. Food and service is erratic (I once walked out after being seated at a freezing table next to the courtyard window and left sitting there on my own for 20 mins whilst staff showed each other their latest TikToks at the bar. I was completely ignored). The food is OK, but just OK. I have always loved Pacamara and the same goes for the Bach, and Eastfield is getting there in the right way and breath of fresh air.
North Port is a lovely place, so a good recommendation. The food scene in Dundee is just so sad and mediocre.
My only issue with the DCA is the rumbling bass of the music which to this old geezer’s lugs seems pointless. Food and service always top notch though. There was a couple of guys working there last summer during the mullet and ‘tache revival who my pal referred to as Hall and Oates.