Hotel Hebrides
Awards all round at hotel
It’s awards all round at Hotel Hebrides after a dizzy year of progress has seen their new standards recognized by a whole sackful of independent judges,
In the past few weeks, the hotel’s mailbox has been jammed by commendatory envelopes. There’s four stars from the Scottish Tourist Board for Hotel Hebrides as a hotel – the first Western Isles hotel with more than 20 bedrooms (it has 21) to reach this standard. From the AA, there comes another four stars as recognition of its soaring standards – Hotel Hebrides started out as a mere renovation of the former two-star Macleod Motel but the project, which saw part of a rocky hillside behind the building cut away to allow expansion, developed into something far more dramatic as time passed.
On the food side, the AA has given a rosette while the Scottish Tourist Board has awarded a Silver EatScotland award. The EatScotland inspector’s report describes the hotel’s Pierhouse restaurant as follows. “A modern restaurant … with lovely views over the water. Local produce used whenever possible and innovative dishes to tempt the diner. Service is excellent with time taken to talk to the diners and regular checks to ensure all is okay with the meal. The staff clearly has an excellent knowledge of the menu.” He rated the ordering process, the serving skills, bill handling, use of fresh ingredients and many categories relating to the standard of the food itself as outstanding.
For owners Chirsty and Angus Macleod, this was all a great reward after years of work. Transforming the hotel began in 2007 and the new bar was the first part to reopen in December 2008. The last 18 months have seen their ups and downs – but the present team came together during last winter and under head chef Richard Agnew, Hotel Hebrides may actually be leading a new food revolution – certainly the level of official recognition is very unusual for new set-up and puts Hotel Hebrides completely in a league of its own in the Western Isles.
For Chirsty, this is an astonishing achievement from a staff operating in a new environment in such a short time – plus the hotel, through the Mote Bar (short for Motel and recalling its past nickname), has maintained all its earlier relationships with its former customers, making sure that it has the widest possible support.
Chirsty and Angus have congratulated the staff on their success – and they have pointed out that a Michelin Guide inspector has also visited the hotel already. That was a preparatory and announced visit which will be followed by others that will be unheralded. Given their success so far, if the standards can be maintained and improved where possible, Chirsty is confident that they can make some sort of breakthrough into that most celebrated of guides.
For Richard Agnew, the awards mark an official recognition of his exciting and constantly changing menu. The adventure and excitement of taste; some real novelty and interest; something to talk about over the table; to remember when you get home; and something to go back for. Except you probably won’t find it – or not exactly the same, anyway.
Every day, either Richard or one of his team comes up with new variations; every day they test them out in the kitchen; and new dishes or variations are added to the menu. When the Hotel Hebrides menu changes, it is really changing, not just rotating a litany of existing dishes.
Talking to Richard, he simply radiates enthusiasm for what he does and for the work of those around him in the kitchen, particularly Simon Macleod, from Kyles, and George Lavery, from Carntyne, Glasgow, and the others in the frontline at the Pierhouse Restaurant. He is a constant whirr of new ideas, new thoughts on ways to cook and prepare food and new ways of organizing the work to make sure that customers always get really exciting, fine, fresh food. Consistency and excitement are the watchwords; as the EatScotland inspector recognized, even the serving staff are trained to know what each dish is supposed to look like when it is served so as to make sure the planned style is maintained for all.
Now, as Chirsty points out, Richard, who is from Northern Ireland and first worked at the original motel four years ago, is head chef of an award-winning restaurant and she is making sure he gets some time off for a rest and further learning and development in the winter to ensure they can go on to even greater achievements next summer.
THE PIERHOUSE RESTAURANT
What is the aim of going to eat in a restaurant? I mean, what are your reasons for going out to eat? There’s getting out of the house; there’s being with a bigger group of people than you can fit round your table; and there’s getting someone else to cook.
Well, all those reasons are good and true – but there needs to be something else, too. Looking back over decades, the truly awful meals I remember eating out share a characteristic – no matter how good the décor and how polite the staff, it was hopeless if there was no effort, no leadership coming from the kitchen.
Back in the 1970s, restaurants in major locations in the UK really did serve stuff that had come out of packets or tins. I remember a couple of truly appalling meals in Oxford in 1973 or 74 – and a really posh restaurant in North Wales using tinned carrots with a main course in the early autumn of 1979.
Now that has all changed long ago, of course, but there is often still a rather complex sameness about restaurant food, where there are long and complicated names for what you eat and flashy words like drizzling are used for perfectly ordinary processes. Did your mother drizzle the custard over her apple pie? No, I didn’t think so, she just poured it!
So perhaps eating out is a bit like going out for a walk. You can stick to familiar paths; or you can jazz the trip up with some flashy gear. You can go to different places and do the same old traipsing along; or you can go somewhere new, do something new, and feel something different. After all, ski-ing is much the same as walking in one way – you are standing up in the countryside – but quite different in others!
With eating out, of course, you need the chef to put on the best metaphorical skis for you – and striding out in front of the pack is Richard Agnew of Hotel Hebrides in Tarbert, a chef who may actually be leading a new food revolution. I recently heard Gary Numan, the long-time electronic music star, interviewed on Radio 6 Music and he made a crucial point about the difference between electronic and traditional music. With traditional musicianship, it was technique that counted above all – how well you could play the piano, handle the notes and so on. With electronic music, it was simply the sound which was achieved that counted, its clarity and purity.
For Richard Agnew, it is exactly those sorts of qualities that count with his exciting and constantly changing menu. The adventure and excitement of taste; some real novelty and interest; something to talk about over the table; to remember when you get home; and something to go back for. Except you probably won’t find it – or not exactly the same, anyway. Every day, either Richard or one of his team comes up with new variations; every day they test them out in the kitchen; and new dishes or variations are added to the menu. When the Hotel Hebrides menu changes, it is really changing, not just rotating a litany of existing dishes.
Talking to Richard, he simply radiates enthusiasm for what he does and for the work of those around him in the kitchen, particularly Simon Macleod, from Kyles, and George Lavery, from Carntyne, Glasgow, and the others in the frontline at the Pierhouse Restaurant. He is a constant whirr of new ideas, new thoughts on ways to cook and prepare food and new ways of organizing the work to make sure that customers always get really exciting, fine, fresh food. Consistency and excitement are the watchwords; even the serving staff are trained to know what each dish is supposed to look like when it is served so as to make sure the planned style is maintained for all.
So where did this all start? Richard was born and brought up on a farm in the rural town of Ballyclare, 14 miles from Belfast, which is where his passion for cooking began at home with his father and brother. After leaving school around the age of 15, he actually trained as a paint-sprayer and worked in industry for several years. But he happened to be in a restaurant being run by a friend when a TV-chef style explosive row led to her partner and chef storming out. “What am I to do about the cooking?” she said, and Richard said: “I can do it,” and he started and very quickly it turned out that he was right. He could and he can – although he has progressed a very long way indeed from the Chicken Maryland that he thinks was his very first publicly served meal.
More than a decade of experience followed in restaurants across the UK and all the time he was developing his own style. From the chef’s point of view, even the most modern menu, with the freshest ingredients and keenest tastes, begins to pall if you have to do the same meals each night. Perhaps Richard is the Chairman Mao Zedong of cooking – he wants continual revolution, the old ways need to be challenged and changed whenever possible. And even yesterday is old!
Describing the food at the Pierhouse Restaurant is a challenge because so many adjectives are over used in the hyperbole of food writing. Plus there is always the difficulty that when you describe something as the best, it is really only the best you have tasted up until then. Like buying raspberries in supermarkets, as they come into season, each punnet tastes better until you finally hit the ones that actually taste like a real raspberry does when it is picked off a cane in the summer. So all I can say is that the dishes I ate when I was at the Pierhouse were the best I have ever tried up until then. Of course, the menu won’t be the same now, except perhaps for the Assiette of Highland Meats that has been on the menu for four months because of constant popular demand.
Richard talks about sourcing the very finest wild and cultivated products and the preparation and the presentation of these ingredients, respectful of their individual integrity. He talks of consistency and quality; attention to detail; and of the menu being young, modern, fresh and innovative. He talks of involving the staff and keeping them motivated to produce the food they have devised, and of the support from the owners, Chirsty and Angus. I have heard all this sort of thing in interviews before. The thing about Richard is, he seems to be actually doing all this and making it exciting as well.
Owners Chirsty and Angus have overseen the transformation of the old Macleod Motel into the ultra-modern Hotel Hebrides over the last few years. They revolutionized the look of the place, and given it a pier side restaurant unlike any other in the Western Isles. They have a chef to provide what Chirsty calls an“exciting, exceptional dining experience. “ And she emphasizes that they can trace most ingredients back to their source with as many from local sources as possible. And the prices are kept as low as possible, too
But in the end, there has to be a “je ne sais quoi”, a particular quality, a unique selling point, if what you do is going to stand out from the rest. For the Pierhouse, it is simply that after all the work and all the words, the food is fun to eat. I suggest you go there and enjoy trying it.
Contact
Hotel Hebrides, Pier Road, Tarbert, Isle of Harris HS3 3DG
