Fresh from our 18 Restaurant & Bar receiving a coveted AA Rosette and 4* silver award for culinary excellence, head chef Calum Hall took a few minutes out to talk oyster luges, his 100% Islay dish, and wading in below the low water mark to source the best seaweed…
Take a walk to Islay’s ancient Kildalton churchyard in spring, and you might spot The Machrie’s head chef, Calum Hall, foraging for wild garlic near the 8th-century Celtic cross. “We have a fabulous natural larder here on Islay,” he says. “People ask me, who's your favourite supplier? And I always say, ‘the island is my favourite supplier’.”
Passionate about supporting Islay’s farmers, growers and fishers, Calum showcases the island’s finest seasonal produce at every opportunity – from venison to lobster, summer berries to shellfish. Taste your way around the island, with Calum as your guide.
“The first thing I noticed when I walked into The Machrie were the views. If you look out of the window in the 18 Restaurant & Bar, it's a beautiful, wild scene.
I’ve been a head chef for over 20 years. Before The Machrie, I was at Loch Fyne oyster bar.
I came to Islay for my family. My daughter’s at school here. I love how safe it is, and how, when she comes home from school, she’s straight outside – on the beach, riding her bike, jumping into the sea from the harbour wall.
When it comes to produce, we use as much from the island as we can: venison, seafood, shellfish, fruit and veg. Around 75% of our food comes from within a 75-mile radius.
I often go foraging around the island; yellow gorse flowers to flavour bread, wild garlic from Claggain Bay or Kildalton Cross, seaweed and sea grass from Singing Sands. It’s a nice excuse to get out of the kitchen and into nature, and it keeps my daughter busy too!
Seaweed’s easier to forage in the summer and autumn because the water’s not as cold. I end up taking my wellies off and wading in below the low water mark – that’s where you get the good stuff. There’s nobody actually cultivating seaweed here on Islay yet like they do on Mull, but that would be an absolutely fabulous thing to do.
Mushrooms are a bit of a secret thing around here – nobody lets on where they are. But we get some great ones, like chanterelles.
Our venison dish is 100% from the island. Everything on the plate (apart from the red wine in the sauce!) is grown, reared or produced on Islay, and that's a lovely thing.
“Our venison dish is 100% from the island. Everything on the plate is grown, reared or produced on Islay, and that's a lovely thing.”
We change the menu as we go through the seasons, and I think that's what sums up food at The Machrie – people come and they see the seasonal changes on their plate.
It’s easy to use exotic ingredients in vegetarian dishes, but we really try to use local produce wherever we can.
Nerabus is a local market garden farm on the Rinns peninsula across the bay from us, which supplies us with fresh, organic vegetables and free-range eggs. We’ve been getting lots of great summer produce from them recently: summer kale, berries, rainbow chard, salad leaves, pointed Hispi cabbage, the ‘snowball’ salad onions – they're lovely, such an amazing flavour – Swiss chard, parsley, fennel, beetroot and purple sprouting broccoli…
I go to Nerabus quite a bit to see Kevin and Heather, who run the farm, and their animals, on Kevin’s grandfather’s croft. Their freerange chickens are kept in the biggest run I’ve ever seen, and they keep ducks to eat the slugs. Getting soft fruits on the island can be a nightmare, so it’s really great they’re growing them locally at Nerabus.
With fresh produce, it's all a matter of what's in season at the time. Kevin from Nerabus will message me in the morning and say, ‘Here's my list for this week, what do you want?’ and I'll take my pick. It's amazing stuff. The flavours from their vegetables are so intense.
Islay is famous for its shellfish. We get ours from a local supplier called Atkins, everything from lobsters to langoustines, crabs and spider crabs. I don't go anywhere else because they're really good to me. If I phone up in the morning, it's here in the afternoon.
It feels good to support local businesses. If you treat suppliers right, then they treat you well too.
We get fresh fish every week from one main supplier at Port Askaig. Their fish is creel caught – no trawling – and anything with roe gets thrown back in.
Our organic salmon is probably one of the nicest salmon produced in Scotland; it comes from up north and it’s got a delicious flavour. Our smokehouse fish comes from Tobemory, which is on Mull – another Hebridean island.
We’ve got a local ‘Laphroaig’ cheese from Kintyre that’s flavoured with Laphroaig whisky, and everybody says it's the best cheddar they’ve ever tasted. It’s absolutely amazing. It’s on a cheese board and one of the starters as well.
Islay lamb is always very good because of the nutrients in the grass the lambs eat. We get our island lamb from Craigens Farm on the west coast of Islay.
My steaks are all hung for at least 40 days, and for venison, we use Ardtalla Estate. They’re fallow deer, not red deer, and they’re smaller with a gentler flavour. There’s a massive deer population on the island, and the animals are shot to order (using the ones in the very best condition) so it's a really sustainable meat.
We’ve always got lobsters on the menu, but shellfish is more available and easier to catch in the summer months. We try to incorporate Islay shellfish into all our fish dishes because it gives that local flavour and connection.
I love oysters. It’s one of those things that I take for granted because I've got access to them all the time. If we go out for something to eat, we go up to the local oyster bar at Loch Gruinart and get a dozen oysters between two. I just like a wee bit of lemon on my oysters. I don't do Tabasco or anything like that. I love the smell of oysters – they smell like the sea.
Most people who try an Islay oyster say they’re the best there is, and our oysters at The Machrie are really, really good. We’re getting new ones dropped off every couple of days, so you know they're good. In summer, they fly out the kitchen.
We do an ‘oyster luge’ using Bowmore Distillery whisky, which is where the oyster luge actually originated. My wife works at Bowmore (the second oldest whiskey vault in Scotland), and she was going through all the old stores and found a big oyster shell with the instructions for how to do a luge actually written on the oyster shell.
It was great getting the AA Rosette, and gave the kitchen team a real boost – the external validation for what they’d been doing all along. The best thing about getting accolades, is the way it motivates the kitchen team and helps bring new people on. It’s great for business, too.”
Experience Islay’s abundance on our two-night foodie break, Taste of Islay – or book a dinner inclusive stay for as many nights as you like.
