Just back from our annual gastronomy tour of north east Fife (via Glasgow).
It’s half-term (my wife works in education) so we drove to Scotland, arriving in Glasgow on Sunday, and on Monday we had breakfast at Singl-end Cafe & Bakehouse, above. (Yes, that is the correct spelling.)
The cafe - in a quiet residential street in the city centre - is named after the single rooms that were found in the working-class tenements that were such a feature of cities in Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries.
According to the National Trust for Scotland:
The working-class tenements, often consisting of a single room (referred to as a 'single-end'), were testaments to the harsh realities of the time. These cramped spaces, shared by as many as eight family members, created a perfect environment for overcrowding and poor sanitation.
From Glasgow we drove to Powmill Milk Bar (which I mentioned in a post last week) where I ordered a strawberry milk shake. The bar is clearly popular because mid morning, and despite being in a fairly isolated location, it was almost full.
(Funnily enough, on the drive home yesterday, we passed another milk bar in the Borders, so perhaps they are not as outdated or on the verge of extinction as we are led to believe.)
En route to St Andrews we also popped into the Ship Inn in Elie, in Fife. Famously, it is home to the only cricket team in the world that plays all its matches on the beach adjacent to the pub.
Elie is one of a handful of picturesque fishing villages that can be found in the East Neuk of Fife. Others include Crail, Anstruther, Pittenweem, and St Monans.
Later, after checking in to our apartment in St Andrews, we returned to the East Neuk for supper - fish and chips at the Anstruther Fish Bar - which we ate in the car in the tiny car park that overlooks the harbour.
It was dark, of course, so we couldn’t see anything, but it’s a family tradition.
On Tuesday morning, back in St Andrews, we bought coffee and freshly cooked bacon rolls at the appropriately named Gorgeous Cafe, just around the corner from where we were staying.
Following an afternoon in Dundee (see below), we had dinner at Haar, a restaurant that occupies the same building as The Niblick, the (former) pub where I bought my first pint, aged 15.
Like me, our hostess at Haar was a pupil at Madras College in St Andrews. Unlike me, she is only 24, and her father was born in 1969, the year my family moved to Fife, which made me feel very old.
The school moved to a new £50 million campus on the edge of town in 2021. Before that it was split into two sites, a mile apart.
The older of the two sites (built in 1832) is now being redeveloped by St Andrews University and will eventually reopen as New College. The newer site (opened in January 1968) has been refurbished and is now student accommodation.
Even better than Haar, perhaps, was Dune, where we ate on Wednesday evening.
Like Haar, Dune is owned by chef Dean Banks. The ‘newest bar in St Andrews’ is a cocktail and wine bar that, upstairs, also offers what is described as a ‘loft dining experience’.
I ordered the octopus hotdog on a crisp brioche roll and it was delicious. (Octopus can often be rather rubbery. This wasn’t.)
Dune (‘The Seafood Shack’) is quite small but very atmospheric. According to our waitress, a history student, the premises were once a morgue, although it feels like it could have been a small chapel as well (see above).
We drove home yesterday (it ended up being an eight-hour drive) but not before we had breakfast at Balgove Larder Farm Shop, Butchery and Cafe where I had a full breakfast. Warmly recommended.
Did I mention the weather? Until yesterday it very cold with occasional light rain and even sleet so it wasn’t conducive to spending a lot of time outside.
On Tuesday afternoon therefore we watched Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy at Dundee Contemporary Arts. (For those unaware of the geography of these parts, Dundee is a 15-20 minute drive from St Andrews.)
St Andrews no longer has a cinema, the New Picture House (opened in 1933) having been sold to a company part-owned by Tiger Woods with a view to converting it into a sports bar.
Like the DCA cafe, the larger of the two DCA cinemas (202 seats) was almost full, mostly with elderly ladies, but it was the first time my wife and I have both qualified for senior citizen tickets, a combined saving of four pounds that my wife immediately spent on a glass of wine.
Oh, and the film wasn’t bad either.
