To the untrained eye, the landscape surrounding Inver, a restaurant located on the shores of Loch Fyne in northwest Scotland, is simply picture perfect.
“I like to say that our shoreline is closer than some restaurants to the stores. We get to harvest a lot of the wild sea greens. There is an old cockle bed directly across the little bay, and from my window I can see a ruined 15th century castle, which stands on the site of a much older castle that’s been there since records began,” says chef and co-owner Pamela Brunton on the phone from the dining room, meters from the water’s edge, as she describes the striking and remote location.
“There are low, sloping hills in the background and we are surrounded by trees – old forests as well as new forestry plantations,” she adds.
This sure looks like a gorgeous spot full of wild nature, but, says Brunton, there’s a bit more to it. “So many people come here and say what a beautiful unspoiled landscape and I’m thinking, ‘That’s not what I’m seeing.’ I see fish farms and forestry and a landscape that’s been completely re-sculpted to suit our contemporary concerns, desires and needs. To say it’s unspoiled is not accurate,” she says.
“It is definitely wild and it’s still beautiful, but to go along with the kind of tourist boardy promotion of Scottish landscapes as this magical thing just felt disingenuous.”
She has outlined these thoughts in her book Between Two Waters, published last year and the winner of the prestigious Fortnum & Mason food book award. The part-memoir lays bare her unwavering commitment to doing things the right way, while exploring the importance of food culture and the elements that influence what and how we eat. It is about “doing all the things that I have said people should do over the years. Well, now I am doing them. It is not easy, but I am doing them because I think they’re right,” she says, adding that doing things the right way is actually more rewarding.
“Because I am morally driven, there wasn’t really another way for me. It had to be like this or not at all. I need my reality to reconcile with my own moral stance on things. So I felt like I really needed to tell this alternative story and show how all of this stuff is connected: what you’re seeing out of the window, the rise of capitalism, Scottish history and culture and what we’re eating – they’re all part of the same story. They’re not disconnected,” she says.
Community is at the heart of the Inver project, which she opened with her partner – in life and business – Rob Latimer a decade ago in March 2015.
This way of thinking is central to Brunton’s approach to cooking – she wants to present the surrounding landscapes on the plate. The message to the diner is “that living on this planet can be a joy, but in order for it to be that way, we have to be conscious of how we’re treating people and the environment around us, and how important all the little aspects of things are.”
Journey of discovery
Brunton describes her career path as “all pretty roundabout, probably like most chefs”. Since dropping out of her philosophy degree at Edinburgh University as an idealistic 19-year-old and finding her way to the kitchen, Brunton has worked in restaurants at home and abroad in a career that has been anything but linear.
When she left university, she decided to take a year out and headed for the highlands of Scotland, where she took on bar work to make money. She was offered a role in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant and “that was it”. She did not go back to university and instead embarked on a career working in progressively better restaurants in Glasgow, then London and later in France.
Along the way there was an interlude to complete a master’s degree in food policy to focus on “the politics, the economics, the social sciences, all the big-picture stuff to do with who eats what, when, why and where,” followed by several years working with food campaigning groups, much of it focused on improving foodservice funded by public money.
After a decade in London, working at restaurants including The Greenhouse and Restaurant Tom Aikens, Brunton and Latimer – an animator who used to work in award-winning studios and now oversees the front-of-house and wine program of Inver, as well as managing the back office – were ready to leave the big city.
They left behind a city of eight million people for the Hebridean Isle of Iona, population 80, in the west of Scotland. Brunton took on the role as head chef of the hotel restaurant. “The food was simple but good; we worked with lots of local producers who brought lamb, fish, and shellfish directly to the restaurant,” she recalls.
“I’m drawn to small communities where you know individuals and they all have a role in your life. I think we make small communities wherever we are – even if we don’t interact with all eight million people in a city, we tend to create our own little community.”
During those “dreaming years” in Iona they hosted a number of pop-up events, and began looking for a venue to open their own restaurant. Defeated by big budgets that they couldn’t match, they instead went to Ghent, Belgium to work in new restaurant De Superette. It was invaluable experience mastering a woodfired grill and complementary to their experiences of doing stages at pioneering Nordic restaurants Fäviken and Noma.
These two proponents of New Nordic cuisine fitted perfectly into Brunton and Latimer’s story.
“We live in a remote location in a landscape that is very similar to the Nordic countries – we share ingredients, we share history – so we went to those restaurants quite intentionally to learn to use products from the landscape. It’s not like we went there and were suddenly inspired,” she says. “We’re very conscious of not creating a theme restaurant of Scotland.”
Food is political
Unlike Noma, which famously restricted itself to cooking with local ingredients, at Inver there are no limits on the produce they use – as long as it’s morally sound. “We have traded with the rest of the world for hundreds of years and to suddenly start only serving lamb and barley wouldn’t make sense. I love spice, so we use spices, we use citrus, we buy wines from elsewhere and things Scotland doesn’t produce, like chocolate and coffee. We do that because we have done so for hundreds of years and you don’t reverse that just because new Nordic is a trend,” she says.
Instead she supports sustainable ways of doing business, buying chocolate that is traceable, for example, bought through small cooperatives that sidestep the major commodity chocolate markets.
Food is political, whether we like or not. She has been conscious of this since she was a child and, aged 11, first connected the lambs in the field with what was on her plate. The experience made her a vegetarian.
This belief eventually took her to the public policy master’s degree after years of working in restaurants. “I was working in fine dining restaurants, some of them very high-end and expensive, and I was very aware that there was a much bigger picture to food out there. I wanted to find out more rather than just feed rich food to rich people all the time.”
The campaign work that followed focused mainly on public sector food in hospitals, schools and prisons. “We tried to promote better use of public money because that is what is funding these places. Instead of putting in cheap food that makes people sick, while certain companies profit, we were arguing that different people should profit from public money and people should get healthier, tastier food,” she explains.
This is nearly 20 years ago, and she is acutely aware that progress remains glacial, recalling a recent meeting in her community, organized by the Scottish government to improve local food access.
“It was so exasperating. It’s like nothing’s changed. We know exactly what we need to make this work: better infrastructure, funding for community hubs, bigger picture subsidies to change so they’re rewarding farmers for not causing environmental damage,” she says. “Why is this going round and round in circles? We don’t need any more of these meetings. We just need to do it.”
Going home to Inver
About a year into the Belgian adventure somebody from home messaged asking: ‘Are you still looking for somewhere to open at home?’ A restaurant had become available and did they want to check it out?
By that point they were not sure – life was busy after all – but in a twist of fate Rob’s grandmother died and they had to travel home for the funeral, so thought while there they may as well check it out. They went to see the property that was to become Inver. “I think I remember saying ‘well, if this isn’t it, I don’t know what is,’” Brunton recalls.
Months later they returned home and weeks after that they opened Inver.
In 2015, Brunton and Latimer had an expectation that the first few years would be about building a reputation, making a name for themselves. They did not expect a global pandemic, which was of course exactly what happened in 2020. Covid-19 and consecutive lockdowns gave them three years of chaos that were at least followed by a time where people had money in their pocket to spend after years of being cooped up at home. “And when they were allowed out, they were really happy to spend it,” she says. “We were really busy right after the pandemic.”
That all turned in 2023/24 – the cost-of-living crisis kicked in and a more unstable world began to be reflected in people’s choices when they went out.Brunton says that running a restaurant today is “as hard as it’s ever been. The bigger picture has changed, people are less secure, and the world is not in a great state at the moment, so people are less willing and less able to spend,” she says.
It is not just the food costs and bills that are spiralling – salaries for staff can account for 50% of costs in a restaurant. Incidentally, Inver has great staff retention, no easy feat in a location far removed from the bright lights of the city.
“There is so much crap going on in the world today that people really appreciate the moral side of what we do and we get staff wanting to work with us because we have the social and environmental credentials.”
Diners too are attracted by the approach. There’s a degree of preaching to the converted – those who visit are already on board with the approach – but Brunton is not blind to the challenges facing everybody and takes nothing for granted.
“The majority of the people come here because they know who we are and they want what we offer, but that doesn’t mean that when people are stretched for cash they can afford to pay what we’re charging people. As restaurants of our kind go, we’re fairly modestly priced, but it’s not McDonald’s, it’s not the café down the road,” she says.
“Sometimes people can’t afford to spend it, regardless of whether they believe in what we’re doing or appreciate the quality of the food. That’s the struggle just now, and I get that.”
So how are the scales tipped – do the joys of running Inver balance out the challenges? “I still love cooking, being in the kitchen, and the bigger picture of hospitality: welcoming people into a place, sharing the edible landscape, and giving them some respite – because we are very good at that,” she says.
“Realistically, it’s not forever. We’re getting older and our families are getting older. I would like to write more. I sometimes think I’d quite like a job where somebody else took the financial risk and they just paid me money,” she laughs. “But I don’t know what that actually means, and I know that food and cooking would always be a part of it. I’m not going to stop working with food, because it’s what I know, and it’s what gives me meaning in life.”
At the end of it all, Inver is about telling stories – it always has been – of a place as well as all the people who are contributing to a meal. “I don’t just mean me, or the cooks in the kitchen and the producers, but the wider community here and beyond, my own family, the things that they’ve introduced me to, and trying to make sense of all of that and be honest with who I am, not excluding influences because they’re not in trend or using things just because they’re in fashion,” she says.
However long Inver’s story lasts, Brunton is bound to keep telling it straight, representing the land around her, imperfections, misrepresentations and all. It is the only way she knows.
Tina Nielsen
