Stonehaven - the Marine Hotel

I need to ramp up these postings. I/we have eaten in so many places but not made enough notes so here is the first of hopefully many to follow. We are exploring the North East now in terms of its culinary appeal. There is a lot going for it - local ingredients, atmospheric locations and sometimes as everywhere people get it so right and sometimes so wrong. And then there are the ones inbetween.

So today I'm talking about the Marine Hotel. It's way up there in my favourite places to eat. The food is lovely, the bar is atmospheric but the loos are nothing to write home about....

Let's start with the food. A comprehensive menu with gluten free and vegetarian options (haven't checked to see if the veg options are also GF I have to admit!), fish, shellfish and lovely cuts of meat. This is complemented with a specials board, which has been different every time we have been in there. Most recently I had the scallops - locally caught. I must admit I don't know if they were diver caught :( They should have come in their shell with a ginger and cream sauce with a crust but they did me a special one to be GF. The scallops were cooked to perfection, that soft but not too soft tenderness. The ginger was not to obvious but to be honest scallops are such a treat, it's nice to let them be the star of the show rather than the sauce.

We often sit in the bar. The sitting area has fishing nets draped around it but not so much that you feel like an end of life cod. The art work is quite rustic, very unique, colourful and reflecting the sea but not in a twee way. Does that make sense? It's so easy for coastal restaurants, shops etc to all interpret the sea in their interiors in the same way, the Marine Hotel manages to take its own path.

So now we're on to the loos....One night we ate in the restaurant upstairs - it was a special occasion, and a lady from the next door table commented to her partner how disappointing the loos are. I hadn't thought about it before, which was strange in itself as I have often found the state of the facilities matches the attention to detail in the rest of the establishment. Until now I had made an exception here and subconsciously ignored them. It's not that they are particularly dirty, but they just don't match the rest of the building, they let it down. It's a small point but somewhere nearly every customer will visit.

I will go back to the Marine Hotel, probably most weeks. They are children friendly, in law friendly, husband friendly, awkward diet friendly, local and tourist friendly. I look forward to seeing how they grow.