Chez Christophe, Inverness - Restaurants in Inverness | s1play.com

Great expectations

Review published on 11/07/2005 © Sunday Herald

Last week I struck gold in Inverness with Abstract, the restaurant that recently featured in Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

Having spent a day or two in the city, I have come to the conclusion that Abstract was probably the restaurant in Inverness that least needed Mr Ramsay’s assistance.

We did manage to have a very satisfactory business lunch in the reliable Rocpool, now called Rocpool Rendezvous, presumably to distinguish it from its autumn-opening Rocpool Reserve. That apart, eating out in Inverness was a struggle.

I had heard good things about Chez Christophe, which inhabits the pretty, pleasant, traditional part of Inverness near the Eden Court Theatre, close to the river. Otherwise, the city has been badly served over the decades by its planners, who have left it looking like one big industrial estate-cum-retail park and connived at the demolition of fine old buildings to make way for tacky modern monstrosities.

Like Abstract, Chez Christophe is a French outfit with jolly impressive credentials. Friends tell me that they have eaten well there. Sadly, we didn’t.

Chez Christophe operates in two rooms in a handsome stone guesthouse. A lovely house, but there is no escaping the feeling that you are eating in the parlour of an elderly great aunt. The décor is almost anti-modern but not appealingly traditional either, what with its reproduction furniture and flush-panelled doors. A blue carpet fights with the red cornice. The ticking of the grandfather clock vies with the endlessly repeating Classics For The Masses muzak. Not my cup of tea, but the food could redeem it, or so I thought.

Home-made rolls were a good sign, had they not been desperately salty. Likewise a pre-starter foamy carrot soup seemed agreeable until the salt hit you. I ordered a Flamenkuche of smoked venison, pancetta and Camembert, a take on the classic Alsatian-German thin, crisp pizza, normally topped with cream, sweated onions and lardons of bacon.

This rendition just didn’t work. The pastry was average, the venison sour and salty. Bits of chewy, fatty bacon did not improve matters. The cheese melted, leaving an unappetising zig-zag of rinds and the whole thing reeked of an absurdly vinegary grain-mustard vinaigrette fit to mug even the biggest and blousiest wine.

My dining companion was miffed to find his millefeuille of apple and duck liver had no pastry, and instead consisted of slices of green apples layered with slices of duck liver roasted in Pineau des Charentes wine. You couldn’t taste the wine at all, thanks to another unpleasant sweet vinaigrette that tasted like liquified Opal Fruits.

My appetite shrivelled. Main courses did not revive it. Roasted canon of Scottish lamb was an ugly piece of meat. The meat itself was served Arctic roll style, inside a thick layer of browned, but otherwise unrendered fat that was more or less inedible. Cordoned off from passing flavours, the more edible meat inside was unappetising – warm, watery and not seasoned. It came in a mush of watery aubergine, surreally slippy miniature mushrooms, more fatty lardons and a few white beans.

The other main course, a tarte Tatin of scallops, was not a lot better. The whole dish was desperately sweet and peppery. Perfectly good scallops were ruined by sitting on a mush of duck confit and vegetables. An overdose of truffle oil dealt the fatal blow.

There was a slight upswing at dessert in the form of a good crusty chocolate cake with a molten interior and a stodgy-sweet financier cake with pecans, but not enough of an upswing to forgive what had come before.

© Sunday Herald