The Creel Inn in Catterline reopens with Indian twist - and is still serving seafood
The Creel Inn in Catterline has reopened after an eight month closure, serving a mix of Indian cuisine and seafood.
The restaurant, now known as The Creel Inn and Indian restaurant, opened on April 9.
The Creel Inn closed back in August 2024 after 12 years under Marc and Fiona Dawson.
New restaurant boss MD Ahmed says locals came out in force on the opening day.
'The opening day was so busy,' says MD, 47.
'The local community in Catterline have been quite excited.
'They have been so, so helpful. There's one word for it: unbelievable.
'People in Catterline, Inverbervie, people who live along the AWPR, they all came out to support me.
'It was fantastic.'
MD says it has been 'quite slow' during the week, but the weekend is 'very busy'.
He adds: 'The customers are happy, and that makes me happy as well.'
The Creel Inn is offering a brand new menu.
Items on the menu previously included mussels, halibut, hake and crab cakes.
'I wanted to serve Indian cuisine because I have experience working in Indian kitchens,' explains MD.
He previously ran Royal Tandoori takeaway in Peterhead for seven years, before moving to Aberdeen.
'For me, it's not about money,' he adds.
'The main intention for me is creating jobs. That's my main focus.'
There are three members of staff working in the kitchen, and two full-time staff members working front of house.
MD also helps out in the kitchen during the restaurant's busiest hours.
The new menu includes a range of tandoori dishes, balti cooking and 'golden oldies' such as kurma, bhuna, madras, vindaloo, dansak and more.
While much of the menu focuses on Indian cuisine, there is also a selection of seafood starters for diners to choose from.
The most popular seafood dish at The Creel Inn is the seafood cocktail, says MD.
This consists of monkfish, scallops and tiger prawns.
Other seafood dishes include a monkfish starter, tandoor grilled tiger prawns, scallops, king prawn butterfly, grilled salmon, fish pakora and fish fingers.
'The local community told me fish is quite popular here,' says MD.
'So we serve a lot of fish as well.
'But the Indian food is popular too.
'Because they don't have many other Indian restaurants nearby.'
The restaurant's current opening hours are 4-10pm Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, and 4-11pm Friday and Saturday.
A takeaway option is also available on the above days too.
The team may also open for lunchtimes in the future.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The National
5 hours ago
- The National
Starmer's approach to global trade is clearly not ‘pragmatic' at all
The UK Government estimates that annual economic output will be a stunning 0.1% higher by 2040 than it would have been without the India trade deal. In contrast, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) noted in Spring 2023 that Brexit's impact in the long run reduces our overall output by around 4% compared with what we would have had we remained in the EU. The amount gained by the 'landmark' India deal is therefore one-fortieth of the amount lost due to Brexit. READ MORE: UK-India post-Brexit free trade deal agreed after years of negotiation Prime Minister Starmer has described the Indian trade deal as a 'pragmatic' approach to global trade. Such an approach would, however, involve the UK Government restoring frictionless trade with the UK's largest trading partner, the European Union. If the UK Government were looking to deliver a 'pragmatic' approach on the economic front, Sir Keir would be looking to get the UK back into the European single market as soon as possible. This would be far more productive than trying to deliver trade deals with far-off countries and deliver immensely higher economic benefits than the paltry 0.1% generated by the India trade deal. Alex Orr Edinburgh THE world must be having laugh at Starmer as they did with Boris Johnson. Starmer considered he had done well to claim first prize with his Trump deal, being the first in the world to do so. Then along came Joseph Stiglitz, an American Nobel-prize-winning economist, on Laura Kuenssberg's Sunday show stating that Trump's method for changing his business bargaining tariffs is to choose the weakest first, then move on to the other countries, which is indeed what he did with the UK. READ MORE: Scottish care sector chief compares Keir Starmer to Enoch Powell in damning comments Stiglitz was a breath of fresh air in his interview, even stating that Scotland did things differently to Westminster especially where student fees are concerned. Starmer behaved like a school boy bringing an apple for his teacher when he presented Trump with an invitation for tea with King Charles. 'What a pushover', Trump must have thought, 'this guy is gonna be no trouble.' And so it was with Starmer claiming a success story with his 10% tariff in exchange for the 1.8% tariff on UK goods to America. Even more than before Brexit when we were part of the EU market. Alan Magnus-Bennett Fife STARMER'S Trump appeasement and grovelling is reaching the point where we're all reaching for the sick bag. Put aside the smarm-fest that was the 'royal' invitation. Put aside the bizarre trade deal, with oligarch-pal and yacht-botherer Peter Mandelson first lapping it up at Trump's left shoulder before looking like a puppet with cut strings when a real reporter (Scottish) pointed out it was all smoke and mirrors. Put aside all the UK's debasement. READ MORE: Police and fire brigade attend fire at Keir Starmer's house I ask again, when is enough going to be enough? Presidential adviser Stephen Miller, creep of creeps, has just announced a possible end to habeas corpus – the foundation stone of the most basic democracies. This follows the deportation of US citizens by ICE and Trump's befuddlement over whether or not he has to 'follow the constitution'. I just wait to see who Westminster will send along to represent Britain (England) at Trump's birthday military parade. Yes – the military parade for the draft dodger who has mocked veterans and banned transgender people from serving in the US military. Might I nominate Tony Blair as the perfect envoy to watch real heroes march by as slimeballs look down from a gold balcony? Amanda Baker Edinburgh I KNOW that modern journalists are generally illiterate about anything to do with religion these days but I would have thought that a journalist for The National would know a little more about the Scottish Catholic Church than shown in your article of May 9 on the election of Pope Leo XIV. The journalist quotes 'international development charity Cafod' about the Pope, obviously oblivious to the fact that this is the aid and development agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. Scotland's equivalent, Sciaf (Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund) is ignored, as is any source from the Scottish Catholic Church. READ MORE: Richard Murphy: Pope Leo can yield power stronger than political force The Vatican is the only state in the world which recognises Scotland as a separate entity from the rest of the UK. The then Pope Leo XXIII restored the Scottish hierarchy in 1878 and the current Scottish Bishops' Conference was born. The current pontiff has taken the name of Leo because he wants to acknowledge Leo XXIII's first modern Catholic Social Teaching encyclical, Reurum Novarum, which protected the rights of workers at the height of the industrial revolution – a sign that he will follow in the footsteps of Pope Francis. By the way, Sciaf, which transforms the lives of the poor, not making them comfortable in their poverty, is at the top of the recipients of funds for projects from the Scottish Government's overseas development fund (which would be much bigger had we been independent, of course). Please note for the future! Dr Duncan MacLaren KCSG Glasgow Former Director of SCIAF and former Secretary General of the Vatican-based Caritas Internationalis I HAD to laugh about the RBS bank notes article in last Monday's National. For the last two years, the ATM inside the Falkirk branch of the RBS only appears to dispense English bank notes (seven out of seven visits). All part of the anglicisation of Scotland, after the Tories changed the name of the parent company from RBS to the NatWest (National Westminster) Group in 2020? A Wilson Stirlingshire
Reuters
14 hours ago
- Reuters
Breakingviews - India's wealth boom is within reach for foreigners
MUMBAI, June 12 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Foreign money managers are pouring into India to cater to the rising rich. Many of them may find success easier to come by than they did in neighbouring China. The race kicked off in earnest this week when BlackRock (BLK.N), opens new tab won regulatory approval to launch a wealth business, within a month of securing a go-ahead for its mutual fund operations. The world's largest asset manager led by Larry Fink is back in the country after exiting a local joint venture in 2018. This time the U.S. firm is in partnership with Jio Financial Services ( opens new tab, an upstart spun off from tycoon Mukesh Ambani's $227 billion Reliance Industries ( opens new tab. Others present also are digging deeper to tap everyday savers. Armed with a new licence, HSBC (HSBA.L), opens new tab will push into 20 new cities in search of wealth clients. Its rival Standard Chartered (STAN.L), opens new tab is pivoting toward affluent clients and away from single product relationships. Meanwhile, Blackstone bought wealth services provider ASK Investment Managers in 2022, whose parent now plans to launch a mutual fund. Underway is a dramatic shift in how Indians put money to work. Households' net financial wealth, after deducting liabilities, rose 249% to $3 trillion over the nearly 12 years to the end of March 2023, per researchers at the Reserve Bank of India. Bank deposits account for 43% of financial assets, down from 51% in March 2012. In effect, households are moving deposits into riskier instruments. Pumped up by a high-voltage marketing campaign targeting mom-and-pop savers, the mutual fund industry's net assets under management stood at 72 trillion rupees ($845 billion) as of May, rising 22.5% year-on-year. Mutual funds' share of net financial savings was 8.4% at the end of March 2023, up from less than 1% a decade ago, per data from industry group Association of Mutual Funds in India and research firm Crisil Intelligence. And there's plenty of runway for growth; the industry counts just 3% of the population as customers. Beyond everyday savers, the number of Indian ultra-high net worth individuals will increase to 19,908, a 50% increase during the five years to 2028, property consultancy Knight Frank reckons, faster than in any other geography. There's also rising interest from richer parts of the 35 million-strong Indian diaspora living to invest at home. To be sure, by some measure India currently has just one twelfth of the investable wealth assets under management that China had in 2020. Ping An Asset Management alone shepherds funds nearly equivalent in value to those of the entire Indian asset management industry. Yet the smaller opportunity may be easier for Western financial firms hungry for growth to tap. A sluggish economy, poor stock market returns, and geopolitical tensions dim the allure of China. Asset managers including Fidelity and Schroders have cut costs and scaled back expansion plans in the People's Republic. India not only saw GDP growth of 7.4% in the March quarter, but its stock market is booming too. Unlike in China where equities have miserably failed to reflect decades of strong economic growth, Indian stocks are better correlated to GDP. Mutual fund investors in India are largely equity-oriented; in China, 68% of flows were into fixed income instruments in 2022, per Fitch Ratings. Of course, local competition is formidable. There are 51 mutual fund houses, and the largest by assets under management are backed by Indian banks with a foreign partner: State Bank of India's ( opens new tab joint venture with France's Amundi ( opens new tab leads, followed by ICICI Bank ( opens new tab with Prudential (PRU.L), opens new tab. What's new is the potential for digitisation to drive down high expenses. Thanks to a distributor-led model, the asset-weighted median expense ratio for equity funds, a measure of cost, was 1.78% in India, higher than 1.75% for China and 1.37% for Korea in 2022, data from Morningstar shows. In partnering with Jio Financial, whose telecom affiliate counts 477 million subscribers, BlackRock probably sees an opportunity to scale up quickly and use technology to cut out the middleman. Only 41% of mutual funds' assets under management are sourced directly from investors, per AMFI and Crisil Intelligence, and the share is probably lower by number of accounts. If executed well, the BlackRock-Jio duo will disrupt the status quo and eat into the business of homegrown technology-led brokers like Zerodha and the soon-to-go-public Groww, which sells one in every four 'systematic-investment plans' where individuals commit a fixed amount, usually monthly, to mutual funds. Both privately-owned companies might be worth up to $7 billion each. Singapore's StashAway, backed by Hamilton Lane and others, has secured over $1 billion in assets under management through digital sourcing within just four years of its launch in 2017. Not everyone feels the prize is within reach. Some of the new strategic partnerships emerging look more like an exit. UBS (UBSG.S), opens new tab is acquiring 5% of Mumbai-listed $5 billion 360 One ( opens new tab and is transferring the onshore wealth business it inherited through the acquisition of Credit Suisse to the Indian group. The Swiss bank closed its own Indian wealth business roughly a decade ago. The India opportunity also has some hard-looking longer-term limits. The real value BlackRock might bring to the table for Indian investors probably rests in deploying their money offshore. That edge is dulled by capital controls; New Delhi imposes a $250,000 limit on sending money overseas. That looks more liberal than Beijing's long-standing limit of $50,000, but India has ramped up taxes on outbound remittances exceeding $11,700. For now, at least, there is plenty to do within India. Follow Shritama Bose on LinkedIn, opens new tab and X, opens new tab.
South Wales Argus
17 hours ago
- South Wales Argus
British man survives Gatwick-bound Ahmedabad plane crash
The Air India flight, which was carrying more than 240 people from the city of Ahmedabad – including 53 British nationals, collided with a medical college on Thursday. The Hindustan Times said 40-year-old British man Vishwash Kumar Ramesh survived the crash, telling the newspaper: 'Thirty seconds after take-off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly.' A video of the crash circulating online showed the aircraft flying over a residential area before disappearing behind trees, followed by a huge explosion and large plumes of black smoke. The public should be prepared for a significant loss of British lives, Downing Street said. Images of the aftermath of the crash showed parts of the plane embedded into BJ Medical College as firefighters continued to tackle the smoke. Pieces of the aircraft's landing gear, fuselage and tail could all be seen protruding from the building. Officials said the flight was departing from Ahmedabad Airport with 242 people on board the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft. Air India said on board the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft were 169 Indian nationals, 53 British nationals, one Canadian national and seven Portuguese nationals. We are deeply anguished by the tragic event involving Air India Flight 171. No words can adequately express the grief we feel at this moment. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families who have lost their loved ones, and with those who have been injured. Tata Group will… — Tata Group (@TataCompanies) June 12, 2025 Tata Group, the parent company of Air India, said it would provide 10 million rupees (around £86,000) to the families of those who were killed in the crash. The company said it would also cover the medical costs of those injured and provide support in the 'building up' of the medical college the plane crashed into. Divyansh Singh, vice president of the Federation of All India Medical Association, told AP at least five medical students had been killed and around 50 were injured after the plane collided with the college. Campbell Wilson, the chief executive of Air India, expressed his 'deep sorrow' after the incident, adding: 'This is a difficult day for all of us at Air India and our efforts now are focused entirely on the needs of our passengers, crew members, their families and loved ones.' (PA Graphics) UK officials are being deployed to India to support the investigation, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said. The King said he was 'desperately shocked' by the incident and Buckingham Palace said he was being kept updated on the developing situation. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the crash was 'devastating', while his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi said it was 'heartbreaking beyond words'. Asked if people should prepare for a significant loss of life, a Downing Street spokesman told reporters: 'Yes. 'As the PM said this morning, the scenes emerging of the London-bound plane carrying many British nationals crashing in the Indian city at Ahmedabad are devastating. 'Clearly this is a deeply distressing time for families. The situation is still unfolding.' Air India chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran described the incident as a 'tragic accident' and a 'devastating event', and said emergency response teams are at the site. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has stood up a crisis team in India and the UK, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said. Search and rescue teams attended the scene in Ahmedabad (Ajit Solanki/AP) The Reuters news agency reported 217 adults and 11 children were on board the flight. Gatwick said a reception centre was being set up for relatives of passengers on board the Air India flight. It is the first crash involving a Boeing 787 aircraft, according to the Aviation Safety Network database. Flightradar24 said flight tracking data shows after taking off, the plane reached a maximum altitude of 625ft, which is about 425ft above the airport. It then started to descend at a rate of 475 feet per minute. A message from His Majesty The King following this morning's tragic incident in Ahmedabad. — The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) June 12, 2025 Air India was acquired by Tata Group from the Indian government in January 2022 after racking up billions of pounds of losses. The airline's UK operations are at Birmingham, Gatwick and Heathrow, with routes to a number of Indian cities such as Ahmedabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. It started operating flights to Gatwick in March 2023, with 12 weekly departures and five weekly departures to Ahmedabad. Gatwick said there was no impact on wider flight operations at the airport, but a Thursday evening flight to Goa had been cancelled. Recent analysis by the PA news agency found it was the worst airline for delays to flights from UK airports last year, with planes taking off by an average of more than 45 minutes later than scheduled. The Reuters news agency reported 217 adults and 11 children were on board the flight (Ajit Solanki/AP) The airline has gained a poor reputation for delays and cancellations in recent years, partly caused by a lack of funds to purchase spare aircraft parts, which led to some of its fleet being grounded. The first flight of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft involved in the crash was in December 2013. The plane was delivered to Air India during the following month. The FCDO said any British nationals requiring consular assistance, or who have concerns about family or friends, should call 020 7008 5000.
