Between two waters Heritage, landscape and the modern cook

Scottish chef Brunton debuts with a scattershot food manifesto inspired by her experience launching Inver, a restaurant on the shores of Scotland's Loch Fyne. In 2015, Brunton and her partner bought a vacant cottage and turned it into a "modern Scottish" restaurant (dishes included "lamb-bone broth with mussels and turnip and seaweed"), winning rave reviews and awards, despite the initial doubts of old-timers who missed their fish and chips. Brunton celebrates Inver as a paragon of progressive food doctrine, serving traditional-ish dishes using organically grown ingredients from nearby farms, treating staff well, and forming close bonds with local farmers, fishermen, and cheesemakers. Brunton's hymn to slow food and terroir leads to a meditation on "fusion cuisines," then evolves into a critique of Western industrial agricultural practices that harm the environment and take advantage of farmers in developing nations. Brunton's writing is best when she sticks to cooking (she describes the sound of a heating pan as "a frantic rattle, like panicked mice scrabbling at the sides of the pan, rising steeply to a seething hiss"). Her case against Big Food comes across more like sophomoric soapboxing, and her vision for a more equitable system of food production amounts to little more than vague truisms ("What if we understood that nothing is ever past at all, but rather living today is dependent on life having been lived before?"). There are some bright moments here, but they're overwhelmed by stale dogma. (Jan.)

Inver is not only about what goes on within the restaurant's stone walls or what goes on in my head; me, the creative cook. It's about the connection we have - all of us - to all the landscapes that buoy us. About acknowledging the collaboration it takes to get any dish onto a restaurant table: cooperation between the insects in the soil, the aquatic life in the loch; with the gardener and farmer, fisher and gamekeeper. The constant recombination of our personal internal landscape with other landscapes; broader cultural landscapes laid over the shifting geographical ones. People ask sometimes if there will be another Inver, in a city maybe, nearer them. And of course we say no, this restaurant could only happen in this spot right here, right now. Excerpted from Between Two Waters: How a Place Inspired a Kitchen by Pam Brunton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.