Dunure Inn

Ayr

LET ME put you in the picture here. It’s a midweek evening. I’ve driven down to Ayrshire with Rocco the Dog. Picked up Lindsey from where he was waiting for me as arranged at a bus stop somewhere on the A77 and we’ve all rolled down to Dunure Harbour.

Frankly, the Scottish Tourist Board should get themselves here this evening with their cameras chop, chop. If this isn’t exactly what every tourist in the wider world thinks Bonnie Scotland looks like every single day I don’t know what is.

There’s a crimson summer sunset lining itself up to smear the sky, laughing children diving off the sea wall into the harbour, a genuine ruined castle brooding majestically over a scrunchy beach that is itself faced by mystic rock stacks on glassy water. The dog walks, we wander, the only thing that’s missing is the soundtrack from Local Hero.

Obviously this is also pretty much exactly the setting your average chubby restaurant critic has in mind when scouring the countryside for the perfect meal. Well, this one does anyway. OK, the diving children are actually wearing wetsuits against the cold water; the beach isn’t the biggest and when we wander into the Dunure Inn and take a table I’ll suddenly remember you can’t see any of this summer stuff going from the inside. But you get the idea.

Now if you’re cynical you’ll be expecting me to reveal at this very point that the only seafood is from the back of a freezer van and that’s breaded scampi and it comes with frozen chips.

I scanned the chalkboard menu as I came in: burger stuffed with haggis? Uh-oh. Honey and garlic salmon fillet? Hmm. But hold hard. There’s another chalk board filled entirely with seafood.

I order at the bar, we sit in the courtyard and within, say 15 minutes, there are two racks of the largest langoustines in all their orange-shelled glory, mottled with that patchwork of lighter colours, greys and whites, creams and blacks that are the hallmark of the very freshest, completely unmucked-about-with prawns.

What follows is a slurpy, slippery feast of shell squeezing, tail dangling and mayonnaise dipping as a dozen or so of these are polished off. The plump tails completely eaten we then poke about with those long silver claw tools attempting to extract the very last slivers of firm white meat. We end up agreeing that there is never that much meat in the claws anyway.

I do at this point wander back out through to where the chalkboard is sitting simply to check just how much these were. £18.95. Good shout.

Scallops now. Heaps of them, faintly pan-seared, served with Parma ham, set in a bowl of dressed salad with crusty bread and butter. Bearing in mind that in Edinburgh you can easily pay over £20 for a much more modest selection this is almost exactly the kind of bucolic bargain that Scotland needs.

If we stop the heedrum hodrum music right here and walk out the door then the little Dunure Inn has done us proud. Although the chef could have been a bit more careful with the pan-frying of the scallop dish, some of that Parma ham being over-cooked, even the lemon having a strangely and unattractively burnt section.

And, of course, this being the real world not everything in it turns out like those tourist board movies. I ordered what was billed as a grilled sole fillet with mash but that turned out to be rather dry and tough rolled, not even slightly grilled-looking, sole fillets with a heavy mash and a selection of huge vegetables that look like they have been chopped with an axe. Carelessness, perhaps, at the end of a quiet evening.

It has not spoiled the meal and the Dunure Inn has fed us well. Bear in mind, though, that out there it is a beautiful evening in a completely seductive setting.

Dunure Inn

9-17 Harbour View

Dunure, Ayr

01292 500549

Menu: Scottishy pub grub but look past the burger with haggis and there are fat, fresh langoustines, plump seared scallops. 4/5

Price: The langoustines alone were a great bargain at £18.95 for a feast full. Generally reasonably priced. 4/5

Atmosphere: It’s all going on outside. No view from inside the inn, but pleasantly enough laid out and comfortable. 4/5

Service: Pleasant enough in a pub-grub type of way. 3/5

Food: With langoustines that fresh, and decent scallops there is not much cooking required. Order carefully. 6/10

21/30