Scorrybreac, restaurant review: A Skye outpost that's pure Brigadoon

7 Bosville Terrace, Portree, Isle of Skye, IV51 9DH (01478 612069)

Chef Calum Munro prepares a starter dish in the kitchen at Scorrybreac House ( Iain Smith Skye Photo Centre)

It would make a good folk song. The Highland lad, brought up on remote, misty Skye, who leaves home to train as a chef on the mainland, then moves to Paris to make his name. Called home by the ties of family and friends, he returns to Skye and starts running a supper club from his parents' house, doing all the cooking on his mum's Aga. (OK, maybe the supper club/Aga verse of the song might need some work.)

With his younger brother helping out in the kitchen and joining him on expeditions to dive for scallops, and a friend helping him catch rabbits, our roving hero rediscovers his roots. Scorrybreac is the result – a tiny restaurant named after the family home where Calum Munro's pop-up was born, perching on a terrace high over the bay in Portree. It boasts just eight tables, a permanent staff of four – chef/proprietor Munro – and scored a glowing mention from Michelin within months of opening earlier this year.

Skye's abundant produce is the tune sung by practically every dish on the menu. Foraged herbs and fungi, local mussels and oysters, fish, venison and game are all celebrated in Munro's broad-minded, sharp-focused cooking. Scorrybreac has put Portree on the food map for the first time. Skye's main town has always been overshadowed by the island's two venerable and far-flung Michelin-starred restaurants, The Three Chimneys, which recently underwent a change of guard, and Kinloch Lodge, home of the Clan MacDonald, where diners feast on Marcello Tully's intricate tasting menus while fantasising that they're house guests at a Victorian shooting party.

Scorrybreac has a much homelier vibe. The two snug interconnected dining rooms, with their bare tables and pale anaglypta walls, still feel like someone's front parlour – maybe that nan you didn't really look forward to visiting. Walking in is a pull-focus experience: we loom pointlessly over the other diners like idling giants, before being swept up in a wave of relaxed charm by the sole waitress. That she is a vision of retro-styled va va voom with inch-long eyelashes, Minnie Mouse heels and a flower behind her ear only adds to the slight air of unreality: even Richard Curtis's casting director would reject her as too glamorous for the part. Munro knows how to write a menu. Smoked haddock risotto with slightly curried egg. Pan-seared halibut, pearl barley, chanterelles and tarragon cream. Jasmine and orange poached pear with honey ice cream and crumble. These are dishes you'd be happy to find in any restaurant, but to find them here, in a whitewashed cottage on the edge of the world, is glorious.

The approach is modern-ish rather than modernist. So while oysters – from local growers the Oyster Shed – get a sharp, shivery Bloody Mary granita to cut their milkiness, a bowl of mussels in a broth spiked with cider and thyme is as traditional as a sea shanty. Less so, the nigella seed and herb bread which comes with whipped caramelised butter.

Nothing that follows is groundbreaking, but it is all put together with precision and good taste. A perfect, pearly tranche of pan-fried halibut on a heap of risotto-soft pearl barley is galvanised by a cream sauce humming with tarragon. Venison, which can often taste like fillet steak without the personality, is given an espresso rub before searing, the slight bitterness offset by creamed parsnips and a full-throttle red wine jus.

With just one chef in the kitchen, desserts are inevitably kept simple – a coffee cup of chocolate mousse fortified with Talisker, the local single malt, and a great salted caramel brûlée which doesn't have much to say to the accompanying shotglass of cider granita.

We are dining on the last night before Scorrybreac closes for a month-long winter break – it will reopen next week – and the place is packed with friends, family and merry regulars. Calum Munro's brother Niall is helping out behind the scenes, and the mature groovers in the corner turn out to be their parents, dining with friends. Munro Senior is Donnie, the Skye-born musician and politician of Runrig fame, the island's unofficial poet laureate-cum-president. As a champion of the Gaelic language, and of the island's fortunes, it must be gratifying for him to see the next generation returning home, something the road bridge connecting Skye to the mainland has made more feasible in the last decade.

It's a feel-good story all round. As the handsome Frenchman dining solo next to us slips the waitress his card, we start to feel we're in some kind of fantasy: the restaurant equivalent of Brigadoon, the mythical village which appears once a century then vanishes. Were our fellow diners really customers? Did we really eat tablet dressed with nasturtium flowers? And if we go back, will Scorrybreac still be there? The answer to that last question, if our rocking evening there is anything to go on, is surely yes.

Food ****
Ambience ***
Service *****

7 Bosville Terrace, Portree, Isle of Skye, IV51 9DH (01478 612069). Around £22 a head for three courses for lunch, before wine and service