The Cellar

24 East Green, Anstruther

01333 310378

Lunch/dinner: £28-£48

Food rating: 4/10

I rarely struggle to identify flavours in food, unless you’re talking about ultra-processed ready meals with ghost-like factory tastes. But the deeper I get into my meal at the Cellar in Anstruther, the more I’m having difficulty distinguishing the make-up of what’s on my plate. So much so, I’m having to refer back constantly to the menu to figure out what’s what.

I start off on a fairly optimistic note. Two amuse-bouches – a venison bonbon so peppery that it prickles the tongue, and a smoked Cuddy’s Cave cheese semolina cake with mushroom ketchup – are both deep-fried, not my sort of thing, but they’re followed by melting, gelatinous beef cheek in an “espuma” (foam) to which local Anster cheese brings a potent Parmesan-like backbone. This turns out to be the best thing in the meal. The fougasse-style bread is a bit of all right too.

Then complication sets in. Slices of plump, fried scallop come with slivers of chewy, unyielding duck “ham”, kohlrabi that’s mustardy hot is as whiffy as sauerkraut, and there's a sweet orange sauce that I can’t place. Crab cocktail with “heritage tomato granita”, and “loveage (sic) emulsion” is chilled into tastelessness by the watery ice. The said emulsion tastes of not a lot. Skinned tomato chunks flag up vinegar more than essence of carefully curated tomato. The overall effect makes me crave a steaming mug of hot chocolate.

The skin on my half Goosnargh duck breast (they aren’t huge to start with) isn’t crisp. It’s flanked by spindly white carrots and blobs of anonymous orange purée (possibly carrot?), another mole-brown purée, compressed peach, which is actually distinctive and rather fragrant, a tube of deep-fried filo pastry filled with what might be minced confit, and a glossy brown sauce that makes me think of sherry vinegar. There’s just too much going on here. Lamb fillet is harder to like. It hasn’t been seasoned or rested enough, so it’s still leaking juices. The pungent taste and odour of the seemingly boiled clove of oversized “elephant” garlic beside it is about as subtle as being whacked by that mammal’s trunk.

By dessert, my head spins and my tastebuds demand a sabbatical. Visually, the white crumb-like structure on my plate looks like white bread. In the mouth it puts me in mind of cloying, vegetable fat-based white “chocolate” that’s been lying around in the toy box. Tallying it with the menu description, it must be the “white chocolate Aero”. Its partner “cheesecake” has the appearance and shaving foam consistency of a marshmallow “snowball” from an ice cream van. Another element on the plate, “meadowsweet ice cream” (my foraging manual promises a honeyed vanilla scent), comes over more like German marzipan or Amaretto liqueur. That leaves a gel reminiscent of the type that comes on old school strawberry tarts, and decorative strawberry halves that don’t taste as if they’ve just been cut.

On the other dessert plate there’s the worrying distraction of two ice blue shards of dusty-dry meringue that might be mistaken for polystyrene. They top coconut parfait that tastes as interesting as canned coconut milk, a cylinder of bland, creamy white stuff dusted in chocolate crumbs (the “chocolate cremeux”) that rapidly melts into a milky slump, and a beige “cocoa ice cream”. Have I missed something? Isn’t cocoa brown?

Why, I wonder, does the Cellar go in for such complication? These are historic seaside premises, a perfect environment for smugglers and pirates. They cry out for simpler cooking, yet I wouldn’t be surprised if its regulars find the food thrilling. But for every diner dazzled by the cunning artifice of chefs playing tricks on our palate with mysterious concoctions of unfathomable components, there’s a cohort that wants to know the origins of what’s on the plate. We’ll still allow our chefs some kitchen secrets, but we are demanding more transparency on both ingredients and methods. Fewer people are volunteering these days to be fed a substance said to be snail porridge, or some such contrivance.

Of course, Scottish gastronomy still has cultural silos: bread-crumbing and battering everything in sight is one. But mucking around pointlessly with ingredients was never hugely fashionable in Scotland anyway, and it isn’t becoming any more so.