Reviews & Articles

Water's Edge Restaurant

From The Sunday Times

November 15, 2009

You’ll find food less travelled at Water’s Edge

In keeping with its island setting, even the ingredients at this harbour restaurant are on neighbourly terms

Allan Brown

These days in restaurants, as you know, everything is and has to be local. The food grew up in the manor. You probably drove past its second cousin on the way there. Every menu tells you all about it, solemnly and reverently. The promise is now the Lord’s Prayer of catering. This locality clause has become restaurant law, so much so that even menus in greasy-spoon cafes occasionally cite it.

A second law, meanwhile, states that when a consensus is a mile wide, it is never more than a millimetre deep, which is another way of saying that the greater the number who believe a thing, the slimmer the likelihood that that said thing is true.

The status as entertainment phenomenon of, say, U2 clearly bears this out. And further examples are to be found in the writings of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the authors of the Freakonomics books, counterintuitive treatises of applied economics, making the case that Everything You Know is Wrong, such as the idea that driving drunk is more dangerous statistically than walking drunk.

The pair address the prevalence of what they dub “locavores” in their latest book SuperFreakonomics. You won’t be surprised to learn that they think neighbourly eating is bad for everything, that buying locally produced food increases the emission of greenhouse gases.

Big farms, they argue, are markedly and measurably more efficient than small farms emission-wise. The transportation of food from producer to retailer, meanwhile, makes up just 4% of food-deriving emissions, which is statistically irrelevant compared with the ungodly amount produced by this new legion of part-time, amateur and craft-centric food producers on their patchwork of small and disproportionately wasteful plots. Basically, forget about food miles; apparently the bio-climatic broth is being spoilt by too many cooks.

One just hopes, though, that the writings of Levitt and Dubner never make it to Mull. Water’s Edge, a cheerful, tidy, family-friendly hotel/restaurant on the harbour at Tobermory, remains in the standard, local-loving mode, roundly of the opinion that food should be delivered by nothing more propulsive than a push-bike.

Indeed, the menu comes with a page of perhaps the most comprehensive list of local suppliers I think I’ve ever seen in a restaurant. The beer is from the Isle of Mull Brewing Company, the bread from the Island Bakery a few doors down. The fish is from the farm at Baliscate, the lobsters landed at Croig and the vegetables and salad are from the gardens of Glengorm Castle. Not even Balamory was quite so collegiate and artisan-partisan as here.

The menu at Water’s Edge is a solid, substantial stab at trying something foodie for the older, more staid constituency of the island, and an evolutionary leap from the species of Scottish hospitality that used to be brown and lukewarm.

It’s clear that the management has found a trusted local and left the kitchen wholly in their hands. So, the food is cared-for and well thought out but designed not to scare the horses with froths and drizzles.

There was a starter of Clava brie wrapped in Parma ham and filo pastry, a long, crunchy tube offset by a punchy red onion and chilli chutney. A roulade of Tobermory trout with cream cheese and herbs maybe had a touch of Good Housekeeping to it. But there was no quibbling with the mains; half a lobster, sunburn-red and fresh with the flavours of sea salt and ozone, and a rib-eye steak with vine tomatoes, a huge, impeccably moist crag of meat from which the trimmings kept an awed, respectful distance. Well, he used to live around these parts.

The Water’s Edge, Tobermory, Isle of Mull, PA75 6NT, 01688 302091, dinner for two with wine, £65