On the shores of Loch Fyne, a sea loch on Scotland’s west coast, is a small and charming restaurant called Inver. It’s run by Pamela Brunton, head chef, and her partner Rob Latimer, who mans the dining room. Out here, 70 miles away from Glasgow, life can be challenging. For starters, there’s the weather, which keeps all but the bravest away during the winter and means the restaurant closes in January and February. Then there’s the remoteness – this isn’t the setting you may have imagined for the restaurant that was awarded the best in Scotland this year in the National Restaurant Awards.

But, as Pamela will tell you, all the things that at first seem difficult about living and owning a restaurant here are precisely what make it enriching. The unpredictable weather is a marvel to behold from a homely viewpoint like, say, one of the vintage school chairs that fill Inver’s intimate dining room. The clear and bracing waters of the loch might not make for year-round bathing, but they produce some of the world’s finest shellfish. The rugged landscape rears particularly good lamb. And, perhaps most importantly, the relative lack of people mean community ties are not only welcomed, but essential to survival.

During our visit this summer, Pamela explained why her definition of ‘sustainable’ food is much broader than what’s on the plate and why, for her, the term is inextricability tied up in the landscape, people and nature of where she lives. Plus, she shares a recipe for mussels with lechoso chickpeas, cumin and spinach.

Pamela: “It never occurred to me growing up that I might make a career out of food. Food was important in the house, but it wasn’t an all-consuming thing. It was almost taken for granted that we were going to eat well.

“I grew up on the east coast of Scotland in a town called Carnoustie, which is famous for golf… I don’t golf! We ate fairly simple, straightforward food that was, for the most part, freshly prepared. There was a lot of fish: Arbroath smokies, haddock, sole filets. And then things that my gran had made her whole life, like potted hough and lemon curd. All pretty old-school Scottish flavors.

“My mum was a keen cook – she still is. She grew things as well, which I think, in retrospect, was a really important part of understanding what good food was. Though she was also working full-time as a teacher, so there wasn’t necessarily loads of time for afternoons in the kitchen.

“My father is from a very typical working-class background; he grew up in a post-World War II prefab in Dundee and his dad was a welder in the shipyards. My dad doesn’t like vegetables and he doesn’t really cook, except when making his special curries.

“When I was aged 13 I announced I was going to be a vegetarian. My mum said, ‘Well, that’s fine, Pamela, but you’re going to have to learn to cook because I’m not doing two meals and your father won’t eat greens.’ And fair enough. That’s when I started cooking in the house.

“I think my food started from a place of comfort, nostalgia and familiar flavours – only now I give them a fresh twist. I don’t think there’s anything particularly cerebral about my food. It’s nourishing. It’s imaginative. It’s about connection and storytelling. And it’s very much about the landscape – my interior landscape, my personal history, as much as the physical location of the restaurant and the cook.

“My partner, Rob, and I were both living in London in 2011 and we wanted out. He wanted to spend less time in front of the computer and both of us loved food and cooking. At that point, I already had a career as a chef.

“I had stopped working in restaurant kitchens, gone back to university, done a degree and was working in food charity and campaign groups. And I, too, was getting a bit fed up with being at a desk. I like the physicality of food and cooking. I like how it engages all your senses.

“To cut a long story short, we first moved to the Hebridean Isle of Iona to work in a small hotel restaurant. I got to practice being back in the kitchen and Rob, who had never worked in hospitality, got to test the waters.

“We ended up staying there for three years before doing our own thing. We did some pop-ups and events and I worked as a baker to teach myself to how to make bread on a commercial scale. Then we came here.

“Initially it wasn’t about wanting to express myself because I had something say. But in the end, it ended up being that exactly.

“I like that I’m bringing skills home to Scotland. There’s a really fantastic restaurant scene in the country now, though very little was going on when we moved back. But what we’re doing here is different to what we would do in Glasgow, for example, which is a big, global city.

“Here it’s a different story because it’s a very different situation. It’s important to me to ground myself in the place I’m in. Although I’ll acknowledge influences from everywhere else, the natural environment is a huge reason to be here – and for other people to come here.

“It’s an absolute joy to be able to allow people to experience that through the food on their plate. Sure, you can go for a walk and enjoy the scenery, but you can also sit down and taste it, feel it, smell it, think about it and hear its stories.

“Sustainability here, for me, is very much about upholding our community and our life. It’s not only about us, but about contributing to all the other people around us, without which Inver couldn’t thrive.

“There are the producers and the gardeners, and also the guests – the people whose lives we’re a part of. It’s a real privilege to be within such a community like that. You’re not just connecting with those you’re feeding, but with those who’ve grown or raised the produce.

“There’s a continuity to it that I find joyful and enriching. Because yes, if you’re cooking in a city you can, of course, have great relationships with your suppliers, but not in the same way as when you are sharing the weather, the landscape, the community hall, the doctor’s surgery, the school. Your customer’s kids are also washing the dishes in the kitchen. You see them growing up, leaving home. They come back, bring their boyfriends and girlfriends. There are real human connections here. It really does blur the lines between life and work.

“My tip to home cooks is to find the best produce you can possibly afford. There are not that many places in the country now where there isn’t access to some sort of market; somewhere that the produces hasn’t travelled from far away, covered in plastic.

“Staples at home? Oats – lots of oats. Porridge every morning. I get slightly obsessed with things like asparagus, peas, sweet corn and tomatoes as they come into season. I’ll eat nothing but asparagus for three weeks and then none for the rest of the year.

“We started buying Herdwick mutton and hogget from a chap on the Isle of Bute. It’s almost wild. Sometimes I can’t get it because the suppliers can’t find the animals!

“The landscape here is almost entirely inedible to humans. There’s no arable farming or horticulture on any kind of scale on the west coast of Scotland. It is good for raising sheep and cows, and that’s it. It means we eat more lamb and beef that we might – or indeed we should, according to what we’re told about the effect of meat consumption on the environment. But those animals are turning hillsides into an edible resource; elsewhere in Scotland those animals would be taking up good land for crops, but that’s not the case here. Instead, we’re eating in a way that’s relevant to our environment, which is crucial.

“This conversation is important when we’re discussing sustainability; it’s a reminder that one size doesn’t fit all. People like to make lists of things like, ‘The top 10 sustainable ingredients’, but that approach doesn’t make sense. It should be about responding to your own situation. That’s not an easy message for a government to get across. But it’s the truth.”

Pamela’s recipe for mussels with lechoso chickpeas, cumin & spinach

“Rob and I went to Sicily on holiday earlier this year and I ate some very fat chickpeas, which were so startlingly delicious that they made me think I’d been cooking chickpeas wrong all these years. It turned out they were a particular variety – lechoso – meaning ‘creamy’. But they’re nutty too, in texture and flavour. They pair well with the creamy, briny shellfish and the brown cumin butter.

“For large main-sized bowls of mussels to serve to two people, you’ll need the following amounts. For four people, double the mussels (allowing 500g per person), chickpeas, spinach and leeks; you won’t need to double the cumin butter as this recipe makes plenty. Sweet poppy peas and young broad beans, or leek scapes, are great seasonal variations for the vegetables. Throw them in the broth at the end to cook them lightly.”

For the cumin butter
50g cumin seeds, crushed in a pestle and mortar or a spice grinder
50g rosemary needles, chopped finely
125g butter
50g sunflower oil

For the croutons
A slice or two of old sourdough bread

For the mussels
Olive oil
200g large leaf spinach, washed and still a little wet
Salt
200g leeks, thinly sliced
250ml dry white wine
1kg mussels, cleaned and plucked of beards
60g crème fraîche or thick cream
1 lemon
200g cooked lechoso chickpeas – you can find them cooked in jars, or buy dried ones and cook them yourself until creamy and tender

Start by browning your butter, by heating it in a small pan till it starts foaming. Now whisk, with the pan over a medium heat, until the butter starts to smell nutty and the little flecks of milk solids turn golden brown. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the foaming to subside a little. Pour the butter through a fine mesh sieve or damp muslin cloth. This should give 100g of brown butter. (Or do lots more, so you can spoon it into all your soups and scrambled eggs).

Heat the brown butter and sunflower oil in a tall pan to 160 degrees Celcius, then remove the pan from the heat. Add the crushed cumin to the butter; it should sizzle, but not scorch. Now add the rosemary. Cover the pan and infuse for at least two hours in a spot warm enough to keep the butter liquid (such as the back of the stove). After a couple of hours, warm the butter back up again and then strain it through muslin into a bowl. Allow the pulp to hang in a warm spot till all the butter has dripped through.

At Inver, we make croutons from simple white bread flavoured with squid ink. You don’t need a whole loaf and squid ink isn’t cheap, so at home we recommend you use a couple of slices of day-old sourdough.

Tear the bread into approximately 1cm pieces. Toss them in two tablespoons of olive oil. Lay them out on a baking sheet and toast in a 180 degrees Celcius oven for 6-8 minutes. Allow to cool on the tray. They should be crispy on the outside but still chewy in the middle. Add a few flakes of salt. Alternatively, toast the bread, dress with olive oil and rub with garlic, and add to the bowls before you spoon over the mussels. It’ll turn into a satisfying fat dumpling in the broth.

Now, slosh some good olive oil into a large pan and add the spinach with a pinch of salt. Put a lid on the pan and allow the spinach to wilt for a minute, before moving it into a colander over a bowl. Wipe the pan dry. Slosh in some more olive oil and add the leeks with another pinch of salt and cook for a few minutes until soft and just turning translucent.

Now add the wine and turn up the heat to reduce it by around half. Add the cleaned mussels and clamp the lid back on the pan. Turn the heat to full and cook for two minutes. Remove the lid; almost all the mussels should be gaping open. If not, stir them and put the lid back on for another minute. After this, remove any mussels that refuse to open as they may have been dead on arrival.

Divide the spinach between two large soup or pasta bowls. Using a slotted spoon, add the mussels. Using a stick blender, or a whisk and a strong wrist, add the créme fraîche or cream to the mussel broth. Taste it – if the broth needs more brightness to balance the briny savoury-sweet mussels, add a squeeze of lemon juice. Add the cooked chickpeas and return briefly to the heat. Spoon in the cumin butter then ladle this frothy broth over the waiting bowls of mussels.

Scatter over a few crispy, chewy croutons, and eat immediately, racing the stale bread to sop up the broth.