Guy Craig

Guy Craig is the owner of the Cove Bay Hotel, an early 1800s coaching inn on the point above Cove harbour, on the south side of Aberdeen, with the North Sea on three sides. Before Cove Bay he ran the Udny Arms Hotel in Newburgh, further up the coast, and it was the position of this place, above the bay with the water below the windows, that persuaded him to take it on.

Since then the bar, the restaurant and the rooms have all been brought up to date without losing what the village knew them for. The public bar, affectionately known as The Cover, has been a gathering place in Cove for more than two hundred years and still is: sport on, the pool table busy, dogs under the tables. The restaurant above it faces the sea, and the rooms above that look out over it.

The kitchen was named North East of Scotland Casual Dining Restaurant of the Year in 2022, and the hotel holds the Scottish Hotel Awards title of Best Pub with Rooms. Guests rate it 4.5 on Google across several hundred reviews and 8.8 on Booking.com, most of them mentioning the same three things: the welcome, the food, and the view.

The hotel is family run, and Guy is usually somewhere in the building. The journal is written from the hotel itself: the menus the kitchen is cooking, the times it serves, the walk down to the harbour, and the parts of the north east that are worth the drive.