Indulge, Auchterarder - Restaurants in Auchterarder | s1play.com

Indulge yourself

Review published on 26/04/2007 © Sunday Herald

Never was an establishment so aptly named than this cafe in Auchterarder. No sooner are you in the door of Indulge than you are presented with a phalanx of cakes, biscuits and bakes.

Not a halfhearted line-up either, rather a full-throated chorus celebrating the joys of home baking. Towering chocolate cake under a molten lava of glossy fudge sauce, drizzle cake with thin slices of lemon glistening on its snowy surface, a squidgy mascarpone, mint and strawberry slice, orange cake, pink not from cochineal food colouring, but the Burgundy-coloured juice of Italian blood oranges, craggy slabs of millionaire's shortbread, plump flying saucer-shaped cookies studded with nuts, rough-hewn carrot cake jewelled with plump, juicy raisins… you'll have detected from this overheated description my weakness for all things cake.

I long since came to the conclusion that the best natural alternative to narcotics is watching a Joan Hickson Miss Marple while munching hot, home-made scones with lashings of cream or butter and Women's Institute jam.

It's not just the cakes either – although, god knows they are temptation enough – but the whole tea/coffee shop experience.

I'm a sucker for the amiable amateurishness, the cosseting, domesticated atmosphere.

Indulge does the whole village tea shop bit brilliantly well, but it has more strings to its bow. This is a surprisingly capacious and comfortable modern cafe, serenely painted in shades of art gallery grey and cream, smartly appointed with leather booths and chunky wooden furniture. Very different from the more familiar rural cafe with its tea-splattered Axminster and mock Tudor chairs coated with crumbs. There is sophistication, too, in the proper coffee and classy Darjeeling.

Indulge also sets itself apart by taking savoury food seriously. Not for Indulge the predictable toasties and baked potatoes. Instead, there's an original, quirky menu which reflects the whim of the kitchen. The selection leans towards vegetables, in inventive forms, like chewy hot parsnip chips fried in parmesan breadcrumbs. And even in the dishes that contain meat, the meat is the secondary element, more of a flavouring for the vegetables.

A case in point was the cauliflower bake with Indian spices, essentially a cauliflower cheese with snippets of bacon, spiked with turmeric, chilli and cumin then baked to produce a golden, crusty exterior. Bacon turned up, too, as a flavour accent in the South Island stew, a pleasant, if straightforward combination of crunchy root vegetables cooked in a faintly spicy coconut gravy. Indulge clearly likes to play around with spices to add an interesting twist. The vegetable broth, a hearty, almost East European soup, thick with pot barley and fresh with tomatoes had a pleasing aftertaste of fennel, or some aniseed-like spice.

The moussaka with Bulgarian spices turned out to be nothing at all like its Greek namesake, being more of a rustic bake of potatoes cooked in their skins with something that tasted like pork sausage meat crumbled over them.

Yet again the spicing was hard to pin down. A bit of thyme, perhaps?

Maybe dill seed? Its creamy, eggy topping tasted good, even if the texture was a bit leathery.

All in all, it made for very satisfying eating along with a simple, very fresh salad dressed with an original vinaigrette containing another mystery ingredient – fragrant honey or orange flower water, possibly.

I feel sorry for the people who work at Indulge. Most of the waitresses are perky, pretty and communicative East Europeans.

They recite the names of cakes and describe their properties and character with the shiny-eyed fervour of evangelists.

"You've no idea how hard it is to work here. You just have to try the cakes, not because you are hungry but because you just have to know what they taste like, " said one.

"And, they change all the time!" another added.

I could sympathise with the dilemma as I made by slow, tormented choice – the featherweight chocolate cake, the millionaire's shortbread with its impeccably crumbly base and the lusciously moist mascarpone slice with its quite entrancing fresh mint perfume that prevailed.

But I also clocked the others, and am now looking for reasons to take me to Auchterarder to check them out.