Tony Monaghan doesn’t have long to talk. There’s a queue forming in front of the Oban Seafood Hut, a green shack on the Railway Pier that was established in 1990 by fisherman John Ogden. Tourists are back and it has been a busy day.
“There wasn’t much of a market for fish in the Nineties so my father decided to open a shop here. It wasn’t very successful to start with but took off year by year,” he explains. “We were selling prawn sandwiches from the top of fish boxes and it grew from there. We’ve a hard-earned reputation.”
The hut now has a small outdoor kitchen with a hatch and wooden table to present the catch of the day, which can include king scallops, langoustines or crab claws.
Each day during the summer season, tourists from all over the world arrive to sample their seafood. It’s a showcase for the local fishing industry. “We pride ourselves in that,” Tony says. “They are not just our suppliers, they are friends. We must have the lowest transport costs in the country.
“We had two tour groups of Americans here this morning. I think some of them were a bit sceptical about how local our seafood is and then our prawn boat came in and there were 45 kilos of live, kicking, nipping prawns being dragged out in front of them, straight into our boiler and 10 minutes later that was them served up.
“It was really good timing actually.”
There’s fishing in Oban all year round with a plentiful supply of lobster, crab, salmon, mussels and oysters among the reasons people visit the resort town in Argyll that connects the West Highlands to the Hebridean Isles.
“My father would call Oban the seafood capital of Scotland and he really emphasised that. The local authorities would say it’s the gateway to the isles, which it absolutely is, but we’ve such access to fishing in the Atlantic it makes the amount and range of seafood and fish available extraordinary.”
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