From fine dining in Glasgow to council secrecy in Shetland

Back on the Old Rock after a relatively smooth 12-and-a-half hours overnight from Aberdeen “atween wadders” as Zetlandic dialect has it. Our sleep fuelled by anti-histamines and the NorthLink ferryfood I always enjoy, in all its cheerful, bluff heftiness. Still, a steak pie is NOT a beef stew with a piece of fragile flaky machinepuff pastry hovering above it. A pie is a pie is a pie: three dimensions, and puff pastry needs its soft and slightly translucent, deliciously chewy, moderately underbaked underneath. Oh yes.

NorthLink provide refectory food, plentiful, hot and tasty, and what you need to settle your stomach on a bed of Phenergan or Quells. The fresh-fried fish is always good, but as we had just been comparing the respective outputs of the Wee Hurrie and the delightfully old school Pavilion in my beloved Troon (the eponymous Chippy next time) it was straight to the meat course. And so to bunk in one of the new ‘Premier’ pet cabins, where you get chocolates and an upmarket dog biscuit. Dex the rescue Staffie cross is as happy as he gets on a boat. Which is not very.

The pet cabins are like gold dust, and already sold out for Christmas voyages. You are asked, when booking, exactly what sort of pet you are bringing. “It’s not…a SNAKE, is it?” asked one NorthLink employee over the phone. Snakes on a ferry: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain. Welcome aboard the Hrossey. We are expecting a calm voyage tonight but you are asked to tread carefully as there may be an issue with an escaped boa constrictor. The children’s play area ball pool has been closed for the time being.”

A neighbour once brought their parrot along for a trip south, and its foul-mouthed screeching apparently set every dog, cat and drunken windfarm worker in the passageway off in a frenzy of barks, howls and miaows.  Such is life aboard Shetland’s arks, the Hrossey and the Hjaltland. Now to try and book a passage for next summer, with hundreds of spaces likely to be taken up by the windfarm and rocket base workforces. Also the inevitable Russian spies and dodgy MI5 bods practising their tae kwondo. Not to mention those pesky tourists, with their pet pythons.

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Still on the subject of food, our trips to the deep south (Ayrshire and Glasgow) are usually hallmarked by dining out with the bairns, all of whom are, in their own ways, gourmets and sometimes gourmand(e)s. An excellent takeaway curry from the Netherlee branch of Cafe India (fenugreek! Taste of the Clyde and my favourite spice!) led in the course of the week through the aforementioned fried haddocks (Troon, with its own wholesale market, also has a terrific wet fish shop on West Portland Street) to Glasgow and even more seafood, this time at the recently opened Crabshakk restaurant in the old Botanic Gardens Garage off Byres Road in the West End.

If you live in Shetland, the problems with eating retail seafood anywhere else are (1) the cost (2) questions over freshness and (3) the inevitable messing about with stupid sauces. Because Shetland lands or farms  more seafish and shellfish than the rest of Scotland in its entirety. And we know how to cook it. An old pal of mine once told me he “wouldn’t eat a fish he hadn’t seen twitching” and most local consumption, certainly outside Lerwick, is in the form of ultra-fresh  ‘frys’ – free bundles from local boats. In our case, this has included lobsters, crabs, scallops, salmon and a variety of whitefish. Not to mention the mackerel and piltock (coalfish) we can catch off the kayaks, paddling in calm weather from the house.

Herring season (my favourite fish) is a little more tricky as the catches tend to go offshore in bulk, and then there’s the brief flurry of raans madness, when cod’s roe goes on sale in local shops and there is a frenetic battle to obtain some, smoked or otherwise. Not everyone likes it. Notably my wife.

Also, we have the terrific Frankie’s fish and chip shop just down the road in Brae, where you can get everything from local Blueshell mussels to skate and scallops, plentifully and relatively cheap. And you know the boat that caught the haddock.

Anyway, we snagged a dinner booking for four at Crabshakk, now next to Nando’s and the excellent Ka Pao, with my daughter and her boyfriend. This was not easy, as it’s extremely popular. The original Crabshakk, down in  Fabulous Gentrified Finnieston was tiny, informal and kind of grungy. This is sleek and very Glasgow glam. I was amused by the music, which changed halfway through our mid-evening booking from too-loud retro rock, all Rod-meets-The Stones-and-Sheena-Easton-in-Topanga-Canyon-circa-1972, to resuscitation suite ear bleeding techno and EDM about 8.30pm, when the elderly depart. We were still there, nursing our puddings. Because, the puddings are the best part of Crabshakk 2. They have clearly ensnared a pastry chef of genius. Maybe it was that Tarte Tatin pastry that spoiled Northlink’s steak pie for me. I tried everybody else’s pud, from the chocolate tort to the baked Alaska, and they were beyond divine. 

All the rest was very good. Dim lighting and a stupidly indecipherable menu aside (digital Courier font reduced in size to illegibility) the seafood was fresh and cooked, on the whole, with care and simplicity. Also it was fresh. Well, as fresh as Shetland Blueshell mussels can be in Glasgow . Hallo, old pals! Native Ostrea Edulis Oysters, though, have been comprehensively fished out of Shetland, though attempts at farming them have been made. The ones we had on ice at Crabshakk ( from Loch Ryan, hopefully nowhere near the infamous dumped wartime armaments) were delicious. Especially washed down with some of Crabshakk’s (very reasonable) cheapest fizz, a Cremant de Bourgogne.

Tempura squid was good but slightly overcooked. Mixed smoked fish was…pretty much the mixed smoked fish (salmon two ways, Arbroath smokie) you’d get in the Brae Garage chiller cabinet, only with lovely horseradish and absent the aofrementioned Bony Arbroath, Scotland’s most overrated processed fish. Believe me, you should try a Blydoit kipper.

Scallops. Now, scallops ought to come with their ‘roe’ (the wee orange crescent, actually the beast’s reproductive organs) and to Crabshakk’s credit, ours did. But these were tiny Queen scallops (different species from King), slightly over-tossed in butter, and the roe in mine was barely present. My daughter had a better plate (which she offered, to her credit, to swop). Lovely. But not the same as that day a diver dropped off a bin bag full of King Scallops scooped from off the Mavis Grind. I had to open a bottle of chilled Buckfast.

Chips – go for the chunky ones, the French fries are generic – were good. But those puddings! Totally unexpected, but so wonderful it almost made you ignore the terrible music. Almost.

The prices, by the way, can be eye watering to an islander  (35 quid for an unaccompanied sole?) but you can also eat on a bar snacks basis very reasonably. Check out the menu here . https://www.crabshakk.co.uk/botanics-crabshakk At least it’s possible to read it online. Oh, and what’s with this waiters-who-don’t-use-notepads stuff? I was going to say something witty but…no, I’ve forgotten. 

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So here’s a thing: where can you go to get food like Crabshakk’s in Shetland? My house. Apart from that, check out the menus at the 88, Dowry and C’est La Vie in Lerwick. Frankie’s is an essential, but it is a chip shop.

 I’ve always found it strange that there is no dedicated fine dining seafood restaurant  in the isles. Faroe has recently gone full Michelin, but they’re catching and cooking puffins, whales and shags there. I think we’ll stick to the occasional seal and  pony (Fair Isle tartare, they call it) I know that actually sourcing fresh seafood in Shetland can be a problem in catering quantities (too much money in shipping sooth) but what about someone starting a crab and lobster shed, an actual funky little shack shack, down by the fishmarket, maybe in Lerwick or Scalloway? We have the blessed cake fridges, all tiffin and heartattacks, but I would drive, yea even to Scallywagdom, for a lobster mayonnaise roll. With chunky chips and seal flipper stew.*

*Not a real thing. But you will find it in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, which is actually the perfect Shetland novel.

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Meanwhile, the St Magnus Bay Hotel next door is doing its Sunday carvery this week and we are booked in for lunch. did I mention that Shetland lamb is the best in the world? 

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Don’t imagine I can’t see the irony of enjoying fine dining while children in Scotland and Shetland go hungry and cold. An old friend’s militantly Marxist mother used to save up and eat regularly in Glasgow’s old and elitist seafood and champagne temple, Rogano. “Come the revolution, we’ll all eat here,” she would say.  

You’ll be wanting to know about the Council of Dark Souls, the Conventicle of Child Starvers…or Shetland Islands Council if you prefer, which voted not to spend a maximum of £600K from its ginormous reserves (£300m) on providing free school meals to all pupils. Probably only £300K in fact if the Scottish Government’s pledge to feed all primary pupils is met. All because the Accounts Commission has wagged its withered finger and insisted that, in the heads of this ragged clutch of ‘independents’, starving weans offers ‘Best Value’…

Meanwhile, this week saw three blessed days of shielded-from-press-and-public ‘seminars’ for councillors, where officials read out the text from PowerPoint slides and dazed elected members dreamt of lunch, or lost windfarm income, or both. And then discuss what they don’t really understand, but definitely do NOT want the public to hear. Or see. 

PowerPoint really is the curse of local government. Listen, folks: I can read. Two sheets of A4, double spaced, in English. No bloody diagrams. If I need any more, I’ll call. My message?

The reserves are our rainy day money. Have a look outside. It’s been pouring for weeks. The Storm is here. But if we want to save cash, let’s face facts: we may have to evacuate some dysfunctional islands and close some failing schools, get rid of the vanity projects like the Tall Ships farrago and forget about tunnels unless private finance or central Government is paying. 

Being promised two Education and Families ‘away days’ now. Please see above. Please. We can read. Send us words and keep it brief. Post them publicly.Enough with the graphics software. Death to PowerPoint! No more secret meetings!