10 • Profi le


BOG MYRTLE? DO YOU EAT


Ten years ago GP Chris Duckham moved to the far north of Scotland and now divides his time between treating patients and serving up inventive dishes in his renowned restaurant


T


HERE are many reasons why the Côte du Nord restaurant in Kirtomy in the Scottish Highlands stands out from the crowd. It is remote, Kirtomy being a 30-strong hamlet lying 50 miles west


of John O’Groats. It is also tiny, seating a mere eight people three nights a week. And it is probably the only restaurant for 100 miles where you will fi nd hand-foraged reindeer moss and wood sorrel garnishing aspects of a 10-course tasting menu, not to mention salted cod balls dusted with fi nely ground pork crackling and a lobster bisque accompaniment served in a pipette – all rather cleverly, if a little bizarrely, presented atop a large, round stone from the local beach. What’s more, the Côte du Nord’s owner/


Element of surprise “People used to phone up and ask what was on the menu. I’d tell them and they’d say, ‘Well you can’t eat that,’ because I’d told them one of the courses included reindeer moss, which is the


here are pretty adventurous, so in fact it’s been the opposite. It’s really popular.” The numbers of diners Chris can


“ I was getting completely burnt out, I was seeing 60 patients a day and it was completely nuts”


edible lichen that grows between the heather,” says Chris. “So we’d have these bizarre conversations.


chef, Chris Duckham, is also the local GP. He is based three days a week in a small practice in Tongue, where he looks after 550 patients, and works an additional two days on a locum basis in Thurso, over in the direction of John O’Groats. So far so unique. But there’s more, as the


Côte du Nord must surely be one of only a few restaurants in existence where the menu is handed to diners, not at the beginning of the evening but at the end. The GP-cum-chef doesn’t have a specifi c name for his counterintuitive approach to fi ne dining, but it all makes perfect sense when he explains how it came about.


I’d say, ‘Do you eat bog myrtle or primrose fl owers?’ And people thought I was taking the mickey. So now I don’t tell anybody what’s on the menu at all. You don’t get a menu when you arrive. You get one at the end. It’s like a souvenir menu. We explain what the dishes are when we serve them.” These days, when making a booking, people


are simply asked what they won’t eat, and Chris makes sure that whatever it is doesn’t end up on their plate. The result is that, right until the food is set before them, diners know only what they’re not going to eat. It’s an unusual approach but it works. “I was


worried at fi rst that people wouldn’t like it because they would be out of their comfort zone. But most of the people who want to come


accommodate might be small but everything else about his off ering is full-size. There are the up to 10 courses, with an option for matching wines. There are broths brewed up in front of customers in an old-fashioned coff ee siphon, savoury tuilles fl avoured with squid ink and dotted with chicken liver parfait, squid ink mayonnaise, wild herbs and leaves, beef fl avoured with


heather tea and all manner of fi sh and shellfi sh.


Going wild What he is aiming for in his dishes, he says, is “a taste of the area” that he moved to from Lincolnshire 10 years ago to escape the “hamster wheel” existence he felt he had been living. “Everything on the menu is either sourced locally or wild. We’d never have anything like aubergines or courgettes. The only things that are brought in from afar are the standard things like coff ee,” he says. They even churn their own butter and make


their own sea salt. “We get a huge pan at the start of the season, the biggest pan we can fi t in the kitchen, and bring sea water up from the bay and boil it down. That gives us enough salt to last for a season.” That many of his ingredients are free helps to explain prices that, considering the ingenuity


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