Firebrick Brasserie

7 Market Place, Lauder

01578 718915

Lunch: £5-£15 Dinner: £18-32

Food rating: 10/10

I DO like family-run restaurants. They have served me the best and most memorable meals I have eaten anywhere, in countries as different as Vietnam and Italy, in premises with facades so discreet they are hard to find, places where there are no menus

and you just eat what you’re given as served to you by parents, children, cousins, uncles, brothers-in-law, while mothers and aunties work in the kitchens. Forced to choose between “amateur” home cooking and “professional” chef cooking, I’ll always go for the former.

Firebrick Brasserie in the little Borders town of Lauder gives you the best of both worlds. It’s the family business of chef David Haetzman and pastry chef Amanda Jordan, who have 20 years’ experience in several well-rated restaurants behind them. I always wonder how salaried – ie, not self-employed – chefs put up with the vagaries of “management”, the accountants breathing down their necks about gross margins, the owners who expect award-winning cooking from an understaffed kitchen. How liberating it must be to jump off that treadmill and work for yourself, even when it means taking on the financial risk.

And if you eat at Firebrick, I hope you’ll agree with me that it has all the hallmarks of a family restaurant that can only prosper. How lovely it was to see a little girl kitted out in an oversized apron, learning the ropes at the till. How life-enhancing to taste dishes with an almost palpable X-factor signifying the pride their makers took in them.

So often I look at menus and little appeals. At Firebrick, there’s not a starter, main course, or dessert that I didn’t fancy, and everything tastes even better than it sounds. Jerusalem artichoke “tart" was more of a flat buttery pastry, its shiny, mahogany-brown contours and flaky innards layered with slivers of the tuber cut thin on a mandolin. These in turn supported a crumble of goat’s cheese and fresh thyme, encircled by hazelnut “pesto”, a divine blend of good oil and gently toasted nuts. By comparison to this refinement, another starter of melting roasted bone marrow, with sour-sweet oxtail “marmalade”, fine chopped parsley and onion, and sourdough toast, struck a masculine, hearty note, but both starters showed the same ability to chivvy all elements present into one delectable whole.

Mixed grill of red mullet, halibut, bass, and sea bream, with a scallop thrown in for good luck, was of the standard I expect from Ondine, Scotland’s foremost seafood restaurant. Each of the six species was gloriously fresh, perfectly grilled, lightly drizzled with a subtle aioli that smacked of top-quality extra virgin oil and pleasantly muted garlic, and accompanied by satiny spinach, and sweet confit cherry tomatoes special enough to make a compelling dish in their own right. Across the table sat another quietly impressive main course: succulent, fine-grained chump of roe deer with herby Dijon mustard crust, on an base of earthily tasty roasted beetroot, carrot and parsnip.

And the chips, oh my giddy aunt, the chips! I’m not sure that I have ever had better. Cooked in dripping, they have that irresistible aroma reminiscent of the well-browned extremities of roast beef joint, and a dry crispness that most chefs only ever aspire to. In Michelin-speak, these chips alone are “worth a detour”.

Ms Jordan is very evidently a pastry chef that any establishment would aspire to headhunt. Here were puddings that show originality (a joyous rendition of the traditional Eccles cake served with clean-cut clementine jelly and vanilla parfait as rich as clotted cream), experience and accomplishment. The “plate of small desserts” was everything I want in the sweet department. Snowflake-fine short pastry, licked with fragile caramel, encasing a velveteen egg custard streaked with red fruit; a racy passion fruit posset where the fragrant fruit acids and esters foil the sugar. An unrepentantly simple cube of dark ganache as soothing as stroking a black cat. A small, yet hugely satisfying, square of white chocolate blondie with butterscotch depths you might lose yourself in.

All this, plus the fact portions are abundant and the prices remarkably reasonable for ingredients and technique of such high standard. This is one family secret that can’t help but leak out.