Roam West, Inchree: the kitchen shuts at half eight, so we rang ahead

It has been raining since Fort William, it is dark on the A82, and we are at the point where the only question that matters is whether anyone, anywhere, is still willing to put a pan on. The wipers are doing what they can, the loch is a black hole on the left, and our two previous attempts are already behind us. Kitchen closed, sorry, have a good evening.

Then a turning on the right, a soaking car park, and a light at the far end. Roam West. We kill the engine, run the last few yards, and push a door behind which it is far too loud for a place we had more or less been told was full.

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The call that saved the evening

A short rewind. Before we landed here we had tried two other addresses, and we got the same answer twice, the one we were beginning to know by heart in that corner of Scotland: the kitchen is closed. Not the place, mind, just the kitchen, already off, and it was not yet 8pm. So the next time we did the sensible thing for once and rang ahead.

On the phone we were told there was normally one table left, at half eight. Fine, we will take it. Except we were not actually that far away, and we pulled into the car park at about half seven, which is a good hour too early, and exactly what you do not do when someone has given you a slot. I had a whole case prepared in the car. I was ready to plead, to negotiate, to look pitiful. They sat us down straight away at a small table without a word about it, and my case went unused.

The hours were not bad luck, they are how the area runs. Roam West gives its restaurant as 5.30pm to 8.30pm and its bar as 5pm to 10pm, every day from 2 March. In other words it is the kitchen that shuts at half eight, not the building.

And if you are wondering why the stoves go off so early up here, you very likely half know the answer already, so let us just settle it rather than make a revelation of it. Highland hospitality cannot recruit, the season is short, and a large share of the housing that used to put staff up all year has gone over to holiday lets. You will have read the same story about your own high street. So a kitchen opens the service it can genuinely hold, and it holds it properly, rather than opening wide and serving badly. Put that way, ringing ahead before you set off is not a precaution for the elderly, it is simply how the place works.

We were sleeping a few minutes down the road that night, in Ballachulish, with Jo. If you are looking for somewhere to put your bags in the area, we wrote up the Rocklee here, and she is honestly the best host we have had anywhere on this Scottish trip, which is saying something.

Destination

Rocklee, Ballachulish: a B&B on the old goods yard, and the best host we have ever had

The best host we have ever had. There, said in the first line, and after all these years staying in other people's houses across a dozen countries, we do not...

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Not a chalet park, and not that Four Seasons

First impression from the car park, in the dark and in the wet: we thought we had pulled into a holiday chalet park with a pub in the middle. We were wrong, though not entirely, and the confusion makes sense once you see how the hamlet is laid out.

Roam West is a lodge, a bar and a restaurant all pressed together at Inchree, just outside Onich, between Glencoe and Fort William, on Loch Linnhe. The lodge runs to twelve en suite rooms, shared kitchens and a drying room for walking, cycling and watersports kit. It is a base for the outdoors rather than a hotel, and you can read that off the people in the room.

What creates the chalet park impression is the actual chalets next door, which belong to Inchree Chalets. This needs saying plainly, because the directories run the two together: they are two separate businesses. Inchree Chalets puts it perfectly clearly on its own site, describing the pub next door as a separate concern. So you can stay in a chalet that has nothing to do with the pub, and eat at the pub without staying anywhere at all, and everybody gets on fine.

Something else we had no idea about as we pushed the door open: the place used to be the Inchree, and then the Four Seasons Pub and Restaurant. Roam West is a takeover under a new concept, with a new team that mixes outdoor people and hospitality people. Review sites still carry listings under the old name, which is why we had two different names in our research and why we were not certain what we would find at the end of the track.

As for the hamlet, Inchree comes from the Gaelic Innis an Fhraoich, the heather meadow. The Inchree Falls sit just above it, a stepped waterfall about twenty minutes on foot, and the Corran Ferry, which crosses the loch at its narrowest point, is minutes away. Had we known any of that in advance we would not have arrived in the dark in the rain. Never mind.

The one word on the menu we could not work out

The menu arrives, we open it, and the first thing we notice is that it is still not tonight that we eat healthily. Venison, fish and chips, burgers, mac and cheese, bangers and mash. Three days of Scottish pubs are starting to show on our plates, and we own it completely.

The second thing we notice is more embarrassing. One word kept coming back on that menu: venison. A pie, sausages, it was on nearly every line. Neither of us knew what it meant. We knew deer, we had never joined the two up, and for a good two minutes we sat there guessing, with the calm confidence of people about to get it badly wrong. We are perfectly aware of how that reads to you. It is a word you have had since primary school.

Caroline had a finger on the line, ready to order. She asked first. It was deer. I will let you picture her face when the plate landed, having chosen what she took to be the safe option. She had a narrow escape, and I learned an English word off a pub menu, which is still my preferred method.

There is a small revenge in it, mind you. The word that defeated two French people is French. Venison came into English from Old French, out of the Latin for hunting, on the same tide that gave you beef for the cow and pork for the pig: the animal keeps the Anglo-Saxon name, the meat on the plate takes the Norman one. So we were beaten by our own vocabulary, at a table in Lochaber, which feels like a fair result.

Once the scare had passed, that menu says something true about the place. The kitchen says it works with local fishmongers and butchers, using traditional methods and old recipes, with a small team. You can read it straight off the listings: wild Highland venison, Mull cheddar in the pasta, haggis and black pudding as burger additions, a Highland cheese and whisky sauce over toast. It is not set dressing, those really are the products of the area coming back up onto the plates.

Caroline was right to order two starters

Caroline made a choice I find cleverer with every passing year: two starters instead of a main. The Great Glen Rarebit, and the soup of the day.

The rarebit is grilled sourdough under a Highland cheese and whisky sauce, with fresh shoots over the top. On paper it could read as a gimmick, the whisky sauce, the name with a ring to it. On the plate, no. It is a properly forward cheese flavour, not a timid sauce hiding behind the alcohol, and the slice is generous. It is very good.

The soup of the day changes daily, so what we had that night will not be what you get. Served with bread, plain, hot, exactly right when you come in soaked. I should not really be able to tell you about it, since it was not mine, except that I helped myself freely, and I will come back to that in a moment.

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Why I am not rating my fish and chips

I had the Beer Battered Haddock, the fish and chips on the menu, served with thick-cut chips, peas and tartare sauce. It was the dearest thing on the menu, the one I had most riding on, and I am going to be straight with you: I cannot tell you what it is worth.

Because I was ill that evening. Not ill enough to call it off, but ill enough that fried beer batter, oil and crunch were not happening. So I did the thing nobody normally admits to: I ate the fish out of it and left the batter round the edge of the plate. The haddock itself was spot on and the portion was generous. Beyond that I can claim nothing, and I would rather say so than sell you an opinion I do not have.

To get some strength back, I went poaching Caroline’s soup. Repeatedly. She let it happen, which says a good deal about her patience, and it did me far more good than my own plate. So there it is, on the record: the fish and chips at Roam West remain officially untested.

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It is loud in there

A word on the atmosphere, because that is what stays with you afterwards. The room mixes long tables and small ones, and the people in it have clearly come to be together, to talk and to laugh. It is very sociable, and inevitably you can hear that.

So this is not where you go for a quiet dinner for two with soft music and low voices. It is the opposite. It is alive, it is warm, it spills over slightly, and after a day of driving in the rain that was exactly right. Worth knowing before you book it for an anniversary, though.

What we did not order

Having eaten lightly, or lightly by Scottish standards, we read the dessert menu right through and ordered nothing from it, which is the sort of decision you regret an hour later in the car. There was a cranachan cheesecake with honey and raspberry sauce, a Yorkie apple pie with tablet ice cream, and above all a thing called the Inchree Trifle Mess: sherry-soaked biscuit, vanilla cream, meringue, honey whip and macerated strawberries. The name alone earns its place on the menu.

On the savoury side there was also the Mac and Mull, pasta in a Mull cheddar sauce with breadcrumbs, and the Bothy Burger with its beetroot bhaji for the meat-free version. Noted, kept, we will be back. Because the honest conclusion of that evening is that we turned up out of sheer desperation and left saying we would come back on purpose.

One last thing, if you are driving round here late in the day: put the number of the place you want to eat at into your phone before you set off. It took us two refusals to work that out. You can do better.

Practical information