Monachyle Mhor
Balquhidder, Perthshire
01877 384622
Lunch: £24-£34 Dinner: £57
Food rating: 8½/10
IF you live in the central belt, and want to give visiting friends a whistle-stop tour of just how ethereally beautiful Scotland can be, and eat some good food en route, then let me suggest a visit to Monachyle Mhor. The journey is a treat in itself. First we passed the Kelpies, Andy Scott’s horse-head sculptures, their sleekly engineered contours glinting silver in the last rays of the sun. (On the way back, their red glow made them look uncannily alive.) Then we stopped off at Balquhidder to pay our respects at the grave of that loveable rogue, Rob Roy MacGregor, in its romantic country churchyard. After that, we curled our way four-miles along the single-track road that skims the wooded banks of Loch Voil. This Trossachs landscape is on a smaller scale than the Highlands proper, the vistas less sweeping, which gives it a more intimate, protective, Shangri-La quality. You instantly become aware of the wildlife, with little birds scudding from branch to branch, Highland cattle munching away, and shy red deer observing you warily from the slopes.
And then at the end of this scenic road, when you can go no further, you reach Monachyle Mhor, sitting up on the hill, all pretty in pink, framed by its cobbled courtyard. The Lewis family bought the hill farm here in 1983, started off with bed and breakfast, then slowly developed the hotel into a restaurant of renown. They saw the value of local food before that was a right-on attitude to strike, so you can rely on bread from their bakery, eggs from their hens, lamb, beef, pork, venison and organic vegetables, all from their farm.
The menu offers four options for each course, but the meal becomes a feast when you bring complimentary extras into the equation. In the snug bar they serve nibbles, in our case, steak tartare dressed, I think, with orange juice, a smoky salmon mousse in brittle choux pastry, and – my favourite – a wobbly parmesan custard dusted in crumbs from Monachyle’s home-made chorizo.
You move through to the conservatory for the meal, with its snowy white table linen, and a view so stunning that it even looks lovely in the rain. Mhor bread appears: a golden, yeasted granary and a looser-textured sourdough, both with rewarding crusts, flanked by a fat disc of butter. Be warned, it’s easy to overdo the bread just because it’s so good; and they egg you on by bringing more if you get through the basket.
Up tips the pre-starter – verdant parsley panna cotta, mellow onion purée, and diaphanous creamy foam flavoured with bacon – then starters. Asparagus from Eassie Farm in Angus comes warm, dazzlingly green, and perhaps a tad too crunchy under a sultry cauliflower mousse at blood heat, under a fistful of shaved black truffles, their nuttiness echoed by toasted, crushed hazelnuts. For looks and refinement, this pipped the other starter, a satisfyingly meaty, but more mundane melting cheek of pork from Tamworth pig, with a vivid splash of beetroot, firm-bodied cannellini beans, and chorizo. You have eaten a meal already by this point, but then there’s the espresso cup of cauliflower soup with nettle pesto. Well, you can’t resist.
Maybe we were too full for the main courses, the meal’s weakest element. Both the rump of Highland beef and noisette of Blackface lamb were too rare, so slack and chewy. Slow-cooked meat elements of each dish (crisped up lamb shoulder, ox cheek braised in a Chinese-spiced gravy) worked so much better. Cooked radishes weren’t a great idea, and I couldn’t see what was “confit” about the potato.
With the desserts though, a return to top form – and how! A sultry warm lemon tart with Mhor’s own crème fraiche (impressed?), and an unapologetically dark chocolate pavé, served with plush dark cherries and a restrained sugar cherry sorbet that pulled off the tricky feat of actually tasting like cherries.
Not an everyday choice, but to hell with austerity. And who needs to use friends as an alibi, even if dinner here does cost £57 a head? Native or visitor, an expedition to Monachyle Mhor is magic.
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