The Seafood Shack

The Seafood Shack runs a converted horse trailer on West Argyle Street, behind Ullapool’s main street and across the road from the museum. Kirsty Scobie and Fenella Renwick opened it as a summer-season experiment in 2016 and the place has become a national award-winner several seasons on, run by two cooks whose connections to the Ullapool fishing fleet shape everything that comes off the counter.

Kirsty grew up on a farm just outside Ullapool, with a partner skippering one of the boats out of the harbour and landing much of the catch the trailer cooks. Fenella was raised in Achmore, with a mother who ran a restaurant in Kyle of Lochalsh and a father who fished from the same coast. The chalkboard menu rewrites itself most days depending on what the boats bring in: tempura squid, scallops in garlic butter, haddock and chip wraps, langoustine tails, crab claws in lemon mayonnaise, hot dressed crab, mussels, smoked-fish chowder.

The model is the takeaway one, hot food in a paper boat and seating on outdoor picnic benches in the small yard around the trailer. The setting is rough-and-ready by design, against the polish of the food.

Awards include the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Award for Best Street Food 2017, multiple Scottish Food Awards, the Jane Grigson Trust Award, and a National Geographic Traveller Reader Award off the back of their 2020 cookbook “The Seafood Shack: Food and Tales from Ullapool”. Seasonal operation, broadly April through October; current menu and opening at the Seafood Shack website.