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The Station Restaurant, Ballater

Review published on 17/05/2004 © Sunday Herald

Two excellent books by Ireland’s inimitable food and restaurant writer John McKenna have landed on my desk: How To Run A Restaurant and How To Succeed In Hospitality. Pithily written with hilariously graphic examples of good and bad practice collected from real hotels, I wish I had been able to leave a copy of each at the last hotel I stayed in, wherein I got a second helping of ‘Highland Hospitality’.

The first helping was last year in Grantown On Spey where I made the usual townie mistake of thinking that I might be able to find something to eat at 2.20pm on a Sunday afternoon. I was fantasising about a welcoming hotel with a crackling log fire. But I was soon put right by a frosty chatelaine of a prominent hotel with her triumphal “Lunches stop at 1.45pm”.

This time we were booked for Sunday lunch at a well-reviewed Speyside inn. The external temperature was around 4C with grey skies, driving rain and gusty winds. Walking into the dining room we thought we had made a mistake. The lights were turned off. There weren’t even any candles. The radiators were cold, as though an austerity drive was in operation. One other couple shivered in a corner. A waitress emerged from the kitchen after five minutes. Would we like someone to take our coats? I clung on to mine for grim death.

We were, nevertheless, intending to persevere until I saw the menu featuring Galia melon with prawns Marie Rose. What is the point of unseasonal Israeli melon and doubtless defrosted prawns on a bleak spring day? It was too depressing, so we jumped into the car, naively confident of finding other better options, and by the witching hour of 2.15pm we found ourselves in Ballater.

We had already established by phone that in most of the restaurants in our guides, last orders stopped at 1.45pm, but one restaurant still looked open. “Are you by any chance still open for lunch?” I asked with dwindling conviction. “Most decidedly not Madam,” came back the reply from a waiter.

All this was beginning to remind me of why I could never live in the countryside and then we noticed the restaurant which occupies part of the old Ballater railway station building. Not only was it busy, but it served a full menu until it closed. Hallelujah!

The Station Restaurant turned out to be a beautifully decked-out eating place with really nice food and tremendous character. it has an elegant Belle Epoque brasserie feel with a distinctly colonial note injected by rather gorgeous Lloyd loom chairs, marble top tables, original wood panelling, a chequerboard floor and towering pot plants. Lest you think this is some precious trip down a pseudo Victorian memory lane, let me reassure you that a highly civilised contemporary mood kicks in with the music, which is all jazz.

Here you can eat a sirloin steak plus trimmings for £9.95 though most diners will doubtless focus on the snackier offerings; panini, club sandwich, croque monsieur. Satiny smooth cream of turnip soup with a flavour almost reminiscent of peanut butter disappeared in a flash. It tasted as though it was made with proper stock.

Thoughts of healthy eating went out the window when the prospect of home-made chips was dangled. They were fantastic too; you could tell they were the proper twice-fried item.

Mine came with thick white flaky haddock encased in beer batter, almost taffeta like in its crispness. A good tartare sauce thick with capers made it perfect. A beef burger suffered by comparison, but it was still a decent, home-made offering served with memorable tomato pickle. Then we attacked the cakes and puddings, deliciously home-spun staples like carrot cake, sticky toffee and brownie.

Who wants to be shoehorned into a stiff-backed formal lunch between 12.30pm and 1.45pm when you can have civilised food and good service in somewhere like this?

© Sunday Herald