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A recent review of Balbirnie written by The Herald (one of Scotland's national newspapers) "The secret's out!"
This Georgian pile looks good in it's photos, but is even more splendid in reality.
You come at it up a long, slowly-ascending hill through Capability Brown-style parkland. As the house comes into view, you get your first eyeful: four towering Ionic columns propping up a handsome and imposing Palladian facade.
Unlike many country house hotels, Balbirnie doesn't deteriorate when you walk in. It has a surprisingly unostentatious reception which gives on to a series of public rooms with pleasing, and rather special, architectural features, all of which have been furnished sympathetically with furniture that is neither exclusively trad homage to the past nor brashly modern.
While many country house hotels struggle to create a relaxed, but well-tended atmosphere and end up being stuffy and uptight, Balbirnie has some of the persona of a grand city hotel. On a Saturday night, it has a satisfying buzz of a welll-managed activity, the feeling of a place that is on a roll.
I felt I was going to get on with Balbirnie from the minute I read the menu. It signals both intelligence and discrimination.
"Main courses are all served with vegetables stated. If you would care for an additional mixture of garden vegetables and potatoes please just let us know" it reads. That's coded language for "We serve each dish with the vegetables that actually complement them but if you're a tedious, value-for-money obsessed diner who demands the grotesque side plate of superfluous boiled British veg, we'll give it to you".
The bread is home-made and instead of butter, you help yourself to Olio Beato, a lovely grassy, peppery, organic extra virgin olive from Puglia. The goat's cheese on toast is not factory chevre but specified as Crottin de Chavignol, which is the proper cheese for this purpose.
What a relief too, after a plethora of restaurants that mix disparate cooking styles in the manner of a child's mud pie, to see a menu that respects the inherent organizing principles of classical cuisine. It offers you perfect partnerships like lemon sole with summer asparagus, new potatoes, lemon and Béarnaise sauce or a garlicky loin of lamb in the French style with melting potato gratin and crunchy haricots verts.
The canapé of seafood fritters slipped down nicely with a splash of chilli and coconut cream dip as did the pink smoked duck croutons with their lively mango salsa. The aforementioned crottin came fondant and gratinated under a little scattering of green peppercorns on fudge-brown melba toast, with a drizzle of apricot purée and a lovely simple salad of baby ruby chard leaves. Peppercorns, goats cheese and apricot is a great combination.
There were fine scallops too, nicely sautéed, sitting on an earthy pea pulp, anointed with a minty butter sauce. Intermediate starters featured a rustic courgette soup, aromatic with thyme and crunchy with croutons, and a rather invigorating vanilla and sloe gin sorbet.
The lamb lived up to all its French bourgeois promise, thick with garlic, pink and tender, a length of flavour which is increasingly absent in so much of our fast-matured lamb.
Unusually, there was veal too. Not, I hasten to add before all those radical vegans put pen to recycled paper, the miserable anaemic crated stuff from Holland, but proper "pink" veal from calves fed humanely on their mother's milk. The loin tasted slightly caramelized and luscious, while the liver was gentle and rich.
Both went well with a robust Madeira sauce and parsnip mash. Eyed from a distance, the steaks look spectacular as did the rugged, chunky chips.
For pudding there was an immaculate rum pannocotta, surrounded by summer berries in tart coulis, with a light cover of warm sabayon...Balbirnie strikes me as a thoroughly accomplished outfit....
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