All fun food in its own seaside way, but not exactly sophisticated dining. And the shellfish is most certainly fresh and plentiful, but it's hard to call even the freshest cockles fine when they're served in a poly tray, eaten while the wind whips half a beach-worth of sand into your mouth. But, on discovering a little restaurant called Peppers and being somewhat captivated by the menu on show in the window, I started to feel rather ashamed of myself for writing Scarborough off.

Firstly, Peppers looks great – not the most important thing of course, but it makes an impression. Just round the corner from the Stephen Joseph
Theatre and oozing cultured sass, this is the kind of cosy bistro that would look at home in any cosmopolitan hotspot.

Not that it has any such pretensions. A glimpse of the menu tells you Scarborough is very much its home. With regular dishes like smoked haddock fishcake and local wild seabass, fish has a strong presence on the menu, but it by no means steals the show.

Delicious local landlubbers like old spot pork from Seamer, lamb from Stepney Hill, and Mill Close farm beef all contend for the limelight, as does the selection of game and fine Yorkshire cheese.

To all the restaurants paying lip service to the growing interest in provenance, let this be a lesson – Peppers shows how it should be done.

If the detailed menu doesn't satisfy, there are chalkboards with yet more information about the source of all this bounty. You could even, we're told, be furnished with the exact ear tag number of the beast you're tucking into. A fact that manages to reassure and disturb
at the same time.

Our interest piqued by just a peek through the window out of hours meant expectations were high.

First impressions on arrival didn't disappoint.

A pre-dinner drink at the bar revealed an additional and very tempting chalkboard announcing the day's specials, and the low-key music and happy chatter acted as further confirmation that we were on to a
good thing.

Both starters were excellent, generously sized dishes. The smoked haddock fishcake came with a perfect poached egg on top and a deeply-flavoured pea purée was surrounded by a very good parsley sauce.

From that specials board came a panfried mackerel fillet with
horseradish potato salad and devilled whitebait – a great combination of flavours that highlighted how underrated mackerel is.

Marvellous though these dishes were,
a heavy hand with the salt meant they lacked the subtlety required to be truly great and erred a little too close to an assault on the tastebuds.

The portion size of the mains put the starters into perspective. Both were pretty outlandish. "A taste of Seamer
Old Spot" was a plate filled with piggy delights: seared loin on a bed of
spring cabbage, a huge piece of crackling, a fat wedge of "Doreen's black pudding", slow cooked belly and crispy bath chaps.

Every single thing on the plate spoke of great skill in the kitchen, right down to the apple sauce.

It's just there was so much of it. Ditto the fillet of "21 day-aged Mill Close farm Angus beef", which came with onion rings and bacon-wrapped green beans.

It was a fabulous piece of beef, possibly the best either of us had eaten, and it was perfectly cooked.

But choosing the "Surf & Turf" option (a topping of garlic king prawns)
proved so unnecessary, we felt we should have been warned against it. It was so big, a plate of top-notch chunky chips survived virtually untouched. And the flavour combination was, again, unsettling and almost too much to handle.

Our wine, Macon Rouge at £18, proved a sturdy enough burgundy to withstand all this, but also soft and fruity enough not to send us over the edge.

At any other time we'd have had to call it a day, but desserts had to be investigated. A raspberry crème brûlée with shortbread and a short sharp shot of raspberry puree was the best of the two: simple, subtle and perfectly judged. A baked Alaska with a fruit compote
and local strawberries was excellent if less refined.

The word "feast" is frequently misused, but it's no exaggeration to use it here and more than justified a total bill of £96.

In the kitchen, Jon Smith, a passionate chef and driven foodie clearly likes his flavours big and his portions huge.

If that sounds like you, you'll be in heaven.

For what they are doing with Peppers, Jon and his wife Kath deserve far more recognition and praise.

If they could serve that verve with just a little more delicacy they'd get it.

Peppers Restaurant, 11 York Place, Scarborough, 01723 500 642.