18, Rusacks, Pilmour Links, St Andrews KY16 9JQ (01334 466 899). Starters £13-£18. mains £24-£57.50, desserts £10-£12.50, wines from £32
Busy restaurants often have their own particular smell: of good things searing on the grill, or garlic fizzing in hot butter, or perhaps of a strategically placed trolley full of ripe cheeses trying to make a run for it. The 18 restaurant atop Rusacks, a fancy hotel in St Andrews, smells of newly pumped testosterone. On a weekday night the place is filled with a certain kind of middle-aged man, most of them American. They are not just seated at the tables but thronging between them and leaning over the shoulders of friends at other tables to bark with laughter at each other’s jokes and war stories. The thing that unites them lies on the other side of the long plateglass window at the back of the dining room, shrouded now by night’s fall. It is the 18th hole of the Old Course, the oldest golf course in the world and therefore the holy of holies for golfers the world over. Let us pray.
Dinner service here is crowd control only just masquerading as hospitality. We have a late table and the person charged with welcoming us does so with the air of someone seeing in the last rental car return at the end of a very long day. Clearly, what is going on in that clubbable dining room behind them, with its wood panelling and green leather banquettes, is just too much of everything. But, of course, they’ll see it through because they are a pro. In the open kitchen, weary cooks slap another damn tomahawk steak the size of a Swiss canton on to the grill and flames leap. At the bar, we are cheerfully asked to move a few seats down, so the barman can spray the zinc top with a widespread cleaning aerosol. It does little for my daiquiri.
It’s all a bit disconcerting. In March, the hotel announced the appointment of a new executive chef to oversee 18. Billy Boyter had previously been the chef-patron at the Cellar in nearby Anstruther, where he had won numerous awards, including a Michelin star, for doing ornate and detailed things with the best ingredients: warm sourdough would come with whipped onion butter; crumbled Arbroath smokie would be served with lovage and garnished with herring roe and seaweed gel; a chocolate crémeux might arrive with a green basil sponge, and black cardamom ice-cream. His appointment here signified culinary ambition and commitment. It just seems that the core clientele didn’t get the memo. What this lot want – and what they get – is cow. An awful lot of grilled cow. At the menu’s heart is a list of Aberdeen Angus steaks, the joints for which loiter in a backlit ageing cabinet by the entrance. There’s a 280g sirloin for £42, a 220g fillet for £50, and one of those tomahawks to share for £115.
There are, however, a few other dishes on the menu, which hint at Boyter’s flair. That’s what we order. A £13 starter is listed as pig’s head on toast with piccalilli, quail’s eggs and pork scratchings. That’s a nice collection of words. The dish isn’t. The “toast” is dry, uncooked pieces of tooth-clogging pumpernickel. The pig’s head is a thudding, room-temperature lump of shredded then pressed meat. The promised piccalilli would have helped this along, but if it was once on the plate, all that’s left there now is a yellow smear across the glaze. The pork scratchings are a scattering of puffs which seem to have softened while waiting hopefully for someone to choose the dish. Grilled scallops for £18 are overcooked. There is no sign of smoke in the smoked butter sauce, but there is a massive whack of acidity as if somebody didn’t know how to cook out the base for a beurre blanc. There is the suspicion that these dishes are ordered so rarely the kitchen has completely forgotten how to make them.
Little improves with the mains. A £40 grilled lemon sole is a well-trimmed piece of fish but, like the scallops, it’s overcooked and the skin is oversalted. The accompanying jug of lemon butter has separated, so I pour only clarified butter over my dinner. The skin-on duck breast has been well rendered and crisped, but the meat is so pink and spongy as to make us think a sous-vide machine might have been involved. A croquette of the braised leg is dry and lifeless. A small pan of sticky jus studded with peppercorns, which has seemingly wandered in from the steak menu, becomes a vital lubricant. A meagre wedge of mulchy cabbage for £7 is served with chilli and garlic ketchup, which makes me wonder at the value of making your own sriracha sauce – if that’s what they’ve done. Beef-fat carrots slump over a glum pesto made with the tops. It has the sludgy, dense texture of silage after a wet autumn.
Not everything is a disappointment. There are very good plump and glossy rock oysters, even if the advertised dressing of charred cucumber, dressed with gin, lime and dill, doesn’t taste much of these things. At the other end of the meal, a sticky toffee pudding is serviceable and an individual baked Alaska is a tribute to the chef’s meringue-piping skills. This is not nothing. But a lot of money has been spent on a lot of disappointing things, so that the strawberry ice-cream at the baked Alaska’s heart ends up feeling like a consolation prize, which is simply unequal to the wider offence it is trying to mitigate.
Because next to us a table of 10 more pilgrims, presumably here to worship at the temple to golf outside, has just been seated. They also have friends; many, many, friends. They keep pouring into the dining room to have drinks and honk at each other like the table is merely the buffet at some cocktail party. The young, friendly waiting staff deal with this roaming mêlée with grace and efficiency, but Sartre wasn’t wrong when he said that hell is other people. Doubtless, they would all think exactly the same of me if we got acquainted. The issue here, of course, is one of pure economics. St Andrews depends on this ready flow of American golfing tourists and I suppose I should take comfort from the fact that they and their obsessions are, for the most part, corralled up here on the 4th floor. But rarely have I punched the lift button down to ground with such a profound eagerness and glee.
News bites
The troubled British arm of Australian restaurant group Karen’s Diner, which sells itself on the performative rudeness of its staff, is troubled no more. It’s gone bust, with the loss of 77 jobs. The 2,500 or so people who bought tickets for the Karen’s Diner pop-up tour are advised to contact their credit-card company to see if they are covered by insurance. In March, police were called to a branch in Prestwich because Katie Hopkins had been invited to make a public appearance, resulting in noisy demonstrations. That same month, the Brighton branch was closed down, when traces of various narcotics were found across the restaurant.
The high-profile Italian chef, restaurateur and TV personality Carlo Cracco is to open his first UK restaurant next month inside Eataly London, close to Liverpool Street station. The flagship restaurant of the Italian food retail outlet will be renamed Terra by Carlo Cracco, and will feature various of the chef’s well-known dishes including his saffron risotto Milanese with smoked bone marrow and his truffled eggs (eataly.co.uk).
The St Austell-born Chris Eden, who had been the head chef of the Michelin-starred Gidleigh Park in Devon for five years until his departure in July, is returning to his native Cornwall. He starts next month at the Watergate Bay hotel, with the new autumn menu for the hotel’s restaurant Zacry’s (watergatebay.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
Jay Rayner’s cookbook, Nights Out at Home: Recipes and Stories from 25 Years as a Restaurant Critic (Penguin, £22), is available from guardianbookshop.com at £18.70
