Birnam Brasserie, Gleaneagles Hotel, Auchterarder, Perthshire PH3 1NF (01764 694 270). Meal for two, including drinks and service £140
Scotland is full of extraordinary sights. One of them lies a few miles from the town of Auchterarder. You sweep down off the barren calm of the Ochil hills and quickly find yourself in the midst of a boutique shopping parade flogging cashmere thongs, wild pearl earrings at £1,000 a pop and hyper-expensive watches to people who don’t need to know the time, courtesy of a branch of Mappin & Webb.
All of this is located, of course, within the Gleneagles Hotel. It’s a quick turn off the A9 and is therefore either the most expensive motorway services in Britain or, given the many activities on offer, Center Parcs for rich people. Blimey, but it’s odd. Drive past the golf club and the men who have actually chosen to dress like that, and you find yourself amid the agitated clamour of high-end luxe. Outside, the building has all the allure of a disused open-cast mine. The main building is a grey, brooding cliff face designed to frighten off the timid. Inside it is a riot of polish and gloss and art deco flourish, with the occasional outbreak of gloomy corridor.
Take a left at reception, watched by a phalanx of crack hospitality commandos who are just gagging to interrogate you, and you come to the shopping parade. It snakes through the building, a tunnel of deep varnished wood and smudge-free glass. Make it through there without somehow having bought a porcelain stag on a hillside, and you come to the spa. More importantly for our purposes, you come to the Birnam Brasserie which appears to be named after the walking forest of Macbeth, not far away to the north. Always fun to have lunch while musing on a play that includes infanticide. At Gleneagles the whole fine dining thing is covered by Andrew Fairlie back up the corridor, where four courses cost £140 a head. The brasserie, which opened a year ago, is the cheaper all-day option. It’s cheaper in the way Knightsbridge is cheaper than Monaco.
I’ll be honest. I’m not suggesting you should actually eat there. I suppose if you happened to be passing and had just pillaged the natural resources of a small central Asian country and therefore didn’t mind dropping £27 on a tuna nicoise, you could go. The main draw is the people-watching. But happily, I’m here to do that for you. It’s hilarious: there are the lifted and the scrubbed straight out of the spa, their eyes fixed in an expression of constant, enema’d surprise; there are the senior couples angrily eating their way through their children’s legacy so the ungrateful bastards don’t get their hands on it, and there are the poor benighted middle managers who have been forced here for a day’s team building with the gun dogs.
The inside space is a low-ceilinged attempt at an Ivy-like brasserie, complete with central bar. It is empty the lunchtime we are there so we are encouraged out to the glass-roofed atrium area with its living wall. I squint at the foliage. It’s green. Very, very green. The stems of these plants don’t actually reach the ground. The whole thing is plastic. Ah well, given the punters here, the last thing you need is anything else that’s especially high maintenance.
The food is a weird mixture of adequate, good and “what were they thinking?” Generally, the menu draws on the French brasserie tradition by way of golf clubhouse. So escargot and steak tartare sit comfortably alongside an £11 BLT and a £26 salmon clam chowder. And yes, I will keep banging on about prices. A £14 frisée salad made with lardons of deeply flavoured dry-cured bacon comes with an unadvertised crisply fried ham hock cake, which the yolk of a perfectly poached egg breaks over tidily. A king prawn, fennel and pink grapefruit salad includes under-ripened avocado that barely snaps. It gets left on the side. Happily, the prawns have been deveined, although at £17 they should probably have been offered a few spa treatments, too.
We are asked how we would like the tuna on that £27 nicoise. At that price, a song, a dance and a joke would be welcome before it threw itself willingly on to the plate. It is an unbalanced dish, dominated by the thick piece of tuna, presumably the cause of the price tag. You have to shift it to one side to find a few green beans, a sliced new potato and a shy quail’s egg. The tuna is so big it’s relentless.
Much weirder is the special of the day, advertised as a pork and duck confit cassoulet. The fact that it only turns up on Thursdays gladdens my heart. It means there’s time to give this classic dish the attention it deserves. A proper cassoulet should take at least 24 hours to make and should be a celebration of the interplay of ingredients. It’s about the way the cheaper cuts – the pork belly, the gnarly garlic sausage – become so much more than themselves, thanks to time and heat. In a proper cassoulet the humble beans become a vehicle for a certain fatty lusciousness. The breadcrumb crust is pushed in under the surface again and again, thickening the stew. And now I’m practically dribbling at the thought of a real cassoulet.
Which this isn’t. At the bottom are white beans in a violent tomato sauce that hates me. The belly, the sausage and the duck confit have been plonked on top. Breadcrumbs are represented by a piece of garlic baguette. It’s a £23 travesty.
All desserts are £9 and almost worth the money, as long as you have an exceptionally sweet tooth and a pancreas that’s been training at altitude. There is a baked Alaska, made with fine fluffy peaks of Italian meringue, over which is then poured a salted caramel sauce. A rum baba with caramelised apples is well made and equally sweet. We need thimbles of hot, bitter espresso after that. Service is, of course, perfect. Young waiters march on through the oddness of it all, as if it makes total sense. Which here, in the gilded universe of Gleneagles, I suppose it does. Just not to me.
Jay’s news bites
The Honours, chef Martin Wishart’s take on a relaxed brasserie in Edinburgh’s New Town, may also help you towards a sizeable bill, but you’ll understand where the money went. The likes of a sea bream tartare or asparagus with egg mimosa are followed by a great menu of grills, alongside an ox cheek bordelaise or roasted Orkney scallops. It’s not clever. It’s just very good (thehonours.co.uk).
More evidence of healthy restaurant growth in the English northwest: Samphire Jersey (until recently known as Ormer) in Saint Helier is opening a restaurant and members’ club in a former Liverpool banking building. Chef Shaun Rankin, who won the original Ormer its Michelin star, has left the business and there is no news yet on who will be on the pass in Liverpool.
Following news that Byron Burger was closing 20 branches, Gourmet Burger Kitchen has announced losses of £7.8m in the year to February 2018. The owners, Famous Brands, attribute this to the ‘adverse macro-economic environment’. In other words, business ain’t good.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
