Tony Ogden always knew he wanted to work in his father’s seafood shack.

Known variously as the Green Shack, the Green Seafood Shack, the Original Seafood Shack, the Oban Seafood Hut, Oggy John’s, or any combination of that list, Tony’s shop is the highlight of any trip to the West Coast. Whether taking in Oban’s seaside vibe or jumping on a ferry over to the Inner or Outer Hebrides, it’s an essential stop. A modest shed around the corner from Caledonian MacBrayne’s ferry terminal, so popular it needs no true designation.

With a bright leaf-green outer, one long wooden table under awning, and a pile of lobster creels shunted into a kind of boundary wall, the shack could look unassuming. There are a few giveaways that this is a hidden gem; the queue snaking along the harbour is the biggest.

“I remember being at school, people used to ask me, what do you want to do? I said I want to run my dad’s shop,” Tony tells me. “People actually used to laugh.”

The shack has been running for 33 years. Tony’s father, John Ogden, was a trawlerman, and in 1990 the price of prawns hit an all-time low. John found himself without any means of recouping his costs.

“There was no way of selling them. It was actually better not to go out fishing,” Tony says.

John got creative. He kept a small shed on the pier to house fishing poles and bait: on the days he didn’t take the boat out for prawns, he would cast a line from the shore. Putting the shed and his predicament together, he thought, “if we can’t get the market to sell it, we’ll do it ourselves.” A lick of paint, a basic stainless steel kitchen installed in the back, and John was ready.

“He started knocking out prawn sandwiches,” Tony says.

Tony is full of admiration for his father and the thriving business he started. Traditionally, a boat returns from a fishing trip, has the catch weighed, and the market manager gives the fisher a slip to say what it’s worth that day. The catch then goes off to restaurants or for export and that’s the total wage for that trip. There is no negotiation.

“It’s quite brave to go out and catch your own stuff and then to go and sell it,” Tony tells me.

Unfortunately, John passed away in January 2023 after a long battle with cancer. “This is the first season without him,” Tony says. “First year he hasn’t been there. They say it all comes at once.”

““If a prawn could see what its future held, I think it would be proud to go to the Green Shack.””

The loss of its patriarch is not the only challenge Tony and the Green Shack faced in 2023.

“We religiously open the second week in March, always, without fail, rain, storms, anything, ” he tells me. However, this year opening was delayed for one very important reason. Tony and his team could not get the stock.

“I don’t know whether that’s due to global warming... We really struggled to get crab and lobster,” he says. “It’s unheard of to get snow in March but we had about six inches. That does have a knock-on effect on the eco cycle, [crustaceans] just don’t come out.”

It wasn’t just the Green Shack facing these issues, as Tony explains. “We heard of an artic lorry going to Dover, supposed to be full. It had seven lobsters on it.”

The fishing industry in Scotland has faced challenges due to unusual weather patterns before. Lobsters and crabs head out to deeper waters throughout the winter and when the temperature is around three or four degrees Celsius, they don’t move much. As the water heats up, they begin to move around the hilly, rocky terrain they inhabit. Tempted by bait left in creels, once they are inside the traps they usually cannot find their way back out. Fishers raise these traps and check their catch to make sure it meets regulations.

In Scotland, the only regulation around lobster is the size of the carapace. In most places, a lobster must be between 90mm and 145mm. It is allowed, though generally agreed to be poor practice, to land a berried female lobster.

I saw this for myself at another of Scotland’s coastal snack shacks. The Lobster Shack in North Berwick sees hour-long queues most days in the summer; Reilly Shellfish in Crail serves fresh lobster and crab. There’s also a beloved cheesy toastie shack at the beach in Kingsbarns. All are worth planning a day-trip around. I am disappointed, though, to see the little lobster I choose for my mid-day meal at one of these places has a tail coated in red eggs. It feels like a waste, and short-sighted—I could have been looking forward to dozens of lobster meals in my future, instead of just this one.

Nevertheless, it’s sweet and clean tasting. Served with a sliver of lemon and a jot of butter, it costs £14 and I eat it sitting on the harbour wall, defending my meal from seagulls and small boys on their holidays.

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By the time we speak in April, Tony’s team has resolved the lobster supply issue, at least for this season.

“The business was built on trawled prawns,” He tells me. “People say it’s harming the ecosystem and harming the sea bed, so we have a quite strong view on that.”

Tony is not sure that the Scottish Government is doing the right thing, restricting where and how fish and seafood can be caught.

There are two main methods for catching shellfish: creel fishing and trawling. Creeling involves lowering wicker baskets to the sea floor; trawling is dragging a heavy, weighted net along the seabed behind a boat. The former, according to sustainable food, farming and fishing advocate Sustain, is “not typically damaging.” Evidence suggests the latter results in long-term destruction and has an 80% bycatch rate.

“Over in the West Coast, there are a lot of creel boats. [The Scottish Government] are clamping down on that now, in the last six months. There are certain sections of water [that] trawl boats can’t go into. Creel boats [also] can’t go, they say that’s unfair,” Tony says. He has a point. If we want to continue enjoying lobster and crab, creel fishing is the more sustainable method of bringing them in.

Trawling, on the other hand, is known to cause lasting damage. The Scottish Government closes certain areas of the water for two years at a time to aid stock replenishment and seafloor recovery following trawling. Tony is not convinced: “The sea’s like a human body, it can repair itself very quickly. I think two years is a bit long.”

Research coordinated by Bangor University states that the quickest recovery from trawling is around six years, with oyster beds and coral beds taking significantly longer to recuperate. The damage done to deep-sea marine habitats will take longer than a human lifetime to heal.

““If we can’t get the market to sell it, we’ll do it ourselves.” ”

— Tony Ogden, The Green Shack

Around 80% of the seafood caught and produced in Scotland is exported. You might also be astounded to know that we also import around 80% of the seafood we consume in this country. The knots we must have tied in the industry to allow this to happen are mind-boggling. Think of the carbon created not only by fishing and farming marine produce, but by transporting it both in and out of the country.

“We have the lowest transport costs in the country for shellfish,” Tony says. “It lands and it’s cooked within an hour.”

The shack is around 30 feet from where the boats unload. Tony has his father’s work ethic and dedication, too. When asked how the shack always has the best quality fish and seafood, he explains: “People don’t see it when it’s 3.30 in the morning and it’s pissing it down, and I’m standing on the pier waiting for a boat that’s late. We’re first come first served to the fish market every single day. Because of that] we do get the best pick of things.”

This is one reason Tony’s shack has built such a strong reputation. It is as popular with the rich and the famous as with us mere mortals.

“My first proper day in the shop, it was quite quiet, my mother worked there at the time and said finish early,” he tells me. “She came home, I’d missed them by 25 minutes—Brad and Angelina.”

The then-couple were in Glasgow, filming Pitt’s zombie movie, World War Z, and asked one of the Scottish crew where to get good seafood. It just so happened he had previously worked a summer job peeling prawns at the Green Shack.

“He laughed at them and said, listen, I used to work at a place but it’s 100 miles away,” Tony says. Next thing he knew, the Jolie-Pitts were heading to Oban. “They got a helicopter, landed at the lighthouse board, commandeered their landing platform, twelve prawn sandwiches and a platter, and went back to Glasgow.”

It’s not only famous faces that are recognised at the shack. “We’ve got regular customers who have been coming for 30 years,” Tony adds. “We have someone who comes every five years from Tasmania. We can pinpoint it by the week. Bob spends just a day in Oban, all he does is sit outside on our bench and eat, and eat.”

I finally get the chance to visit the Green Shack in July, before catching a ferry to Tiree for an ill-fated music festival (it is eventually cancelled the night before kick-off due to Beaufort Force 10 winds—two levels down from hurricane). It is truly difficult to make a decision but I opt for a plate of freshly shucked oysters, served simply on ice with lemon, a pot of smoked salmon, and a prawn sandwich.

The oysters are huge and sweet. The salmon, smoked by the team in-house, is delicate and moreish. The prawn sandwich, though. When I tell you it is the best prawn sandwich I’ve ever had, I want to be clear: I’m into prawns. Prawns feature heavily on my Off Menu meal. I would choose them over lobster. This sandwich is what all other sandwiches aspire to be. And it costs less than a fiver.

The bread? Basic Warburton’s wholemeal. Not even the thick stuff. A slick of margarine and one leaf from an iceberg lettuce. It shouldn’t work. But the quality of the prawns, and the sheer quantity of them, crammed in until they are spilling from each edge, are the defining factors. A very gentle Marie Rose, sparse enough to see the pink striping on the crustaceans themselves, does the job of holding the whole thing together. If a prawn could see what its future holds, I think it would be proud to go to the Green Shack.

As fishers rage against Marine Protection Areas and quota limits, and as the majority of Scottish seafood continues to be shipped abroad, as fisheries devastate the local wildlife around them, and with labelling being confusing to the point of meaninglessness, it can seem as though there’s no correct way to enjoy the bounty of the sea. My view is that if we are going to eat lobster, crab, scallops and prawns, we should be trying to eat them locally, and only those which are caught via sustainable methods. For now, Oggy John’s seafood shack is the closest thing we have to this ideal.