The River Tummel in Perthshire, Scotland, June 15, 2023. Photo / Robert Ormerod, The New York Times
Cool-kid chefs turning local bounty into Michelin-worthy dishes, an artisan whisky boom and a clutch of stylish hotels have helped Scotland shrug off its saturnine image and rebrand as a misty, moody mecca.
The cult following of the time-travel television series Outlander has added to the patina. Its depiction of Highland clan life, along with stunning locations from Inverness to Edinburgh, has fuelled a tourism spike that the National Trust for Scotland refers to as “the Outlander Effect.”
One thing is clear: Between women-helmed whisky startups, the rise in gastronomic tasting menus in middle-of-nowhere settings and the classic tartan pattern’s spike in popularity, Gaelic culture has been rejiggered in a fresh and exciting way. It’s enough to make closely held traditions relevant to Millennials, Gen Z and people old enough to remember when Braveheart came out on the big screen. Here, some of the new Scotland highlights.
If there were a symbol for Scotland, it would be tartan. You see it everywhere, from hotel interiors and tabletop items to cookie tins and everyday clothing. For centuries, tartan, which comes in thousands of iterations, has served as an identifying feature for Highland clans. When the British government attempted to restrain the use of “Highland dress” in 1747, after the failed Jacobite Rising, tartan became a testament to endurance, even rebellion.
“Tartan, today, is a symbol of subcultures everywhere, not just in Scotland,” said Mhairi Maxwell, a curator of the “Tartan” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, which runs until January 2024, giving historic context to how a humble fabric became a global symbol and driving force in fashion and design.
To the 34-year-old Araminta Campbell, custom tartan is the stuff of modern heirlooms. She creates one-of-a-kind patterns that express her clients’ ancestry, interests and connections to place. Her ready-made shawls, scarves and throws can be found at the Scottish Textiles Showcase in Edinburgh, a shop near the Royal Mile that supports local wool mills and artisan makers producing sustainable products. Custom pieces are by appointment at the designer’s atelier. Ready-made pieces start at £295 (about $629); custom pieces start at £5000.
At Fhior in Edinburgh, chef Scott Smith’s passion for coaxing knock-your-socks-off flavour from humble Scottish ingredients is displayed in his seven- and 10-course tasting menus. One dish, flash-fried, koji-brined cauliflower with a relish of lovage-seed spiked apricot, is an umami blast with burnt orange zip. The cuisine may be haute, but the vibe is not. “We focus on flavour, not pretence,” said Smith, 34, of his casually cool restaurant, with a wall mural painted by the staff (it hides the cracks) and Arctic Monkeys-heavy playlist (£85 for seven courses; £105 for 10 courses, without alcohol).
What was once a tourist cafeteria inside the country’s oldest working distillery is now a six-table fine-dining restaurant. The Glenturret whisky brand was purchased by Lalique, the French glassmaker, in 2018, and at the Glenturret Lalique Restaurant in rural Perthshire, an hour’s drive from Glasgow, chef Mark Donald works with local foragers, gamekeepers and fishers to orchestrate 16-course tasting menus that give Scottish staples a kick — with humour.
Case in point: His version of a tattie scone, a breakfast staple of fried unleavened potato bread, is an opulent one-bite, mayo-laced bao bun layered with Highland Wagyu beef, truffle and a bump of caviar.
Whisky, naturally, makes cameos. A pre-dessert cocktail features a tableside mist of aromatic “new make” (whisky before it is cask-aged), which perfumes the drink and the air. “We want to smash stereotypes and make guests feel that they’ve had more than just a meal,” said the 34-year-old chef, who cut his teeth at Noma, Gleneagles and the Balmoral Hotel. The restaurant recently earned a Michelin Star (£195 without alcohol; wine pairings are an additional £110).
In 2021, Tom Tsappis and Matilda Ruffle, both in their 30s, opened the five-room Killiecrankie House in a 19th-century former vicarage in Perthshire. It is part of a growing trend of “restaurants with rooms,” small country guesthouses offering sophisticated dinners.
The couple envisioned a boundary-pushing tasting menu with lots of cheek and zero haughtiness.
Here’s how a stay unfolds: After the 4pm check-in, guests gather for cocktails and get-to-know-you banter, either in the teal-and-pink salon or the garden. At 7pm, the three-hour dinner begins. First are light bites like venison tartare flecked with pickled garlic buds and served with bramble puree, and a seaweed “cornetto” filled with salmon belly tartare and salmon mousse. Then come heartier dishes like liver and onions, which uses sake-cured monkfish liver instead of the usual beef.
Drinks pairings are equally plucky, with a cider from Fife, a dry-hopped local lager and a Cypriot dessert wine called Commandaria (dinner, £105 without alcohol; the “discovery” drinks pairing is an additional £75; overnight stay is £520 for two with dinner and breakfast).
The Dipping Lugger, which also opened during the pandemic, is a love song to a centuries-old house, the notable characters who inhabited it and the fishing village (Ullapool) that surrounds it. The design of the three-room property juxtaposes period pieces with whimsical ones: wingback chairs, fireplaces, velvet sofas set off by quirky wallpaper, and framed posters of Mumford & Sons and other bands, a nod to the side gig of the owners Robert Hicks, 52, and Helen Chalmers, 42, as music promoters.
Food, of course, is the focus. The ever-changing, seven-course menu of chef David Smith, 31, is a snapshot of the environs. For example, seaweed powder-dusted Loch Broom langoustine is plated with a prawn ravioli dotted with lemon purde and sea fennel; a smoky Lapsang souchong tea-bathed deer loin has a bright pea puree and pickled trumpet mushrooms. Of note: The property is along the spectacularly scenic North Highlands route known as the North Coast 500 (dinner, £95; £60 for wine pairings; overnight, £450 includes dinner and breakfast for two).
“Good cooking is storytelling: who you are, where you came from and where you are right now,” explained chef Pamela Brunton, 45, a pioneer of destination tasting menus in Scotland. Since 2015, Brunton has been redefining the concept of modern Scottish cuisine from the whitewashed fisherman’s-cottage-turned-restaurant called Inver that she operates with her partner, Rob Latimer, 44, in the Northwest Highlands. Dishes ooze the here and now: oysters just pulled from the loch drizzled with citrusy sea buckthorn juice; local lamb paired with hedgerow herbs and served with a wild garlic emulsion; asparagus with foraged sea beet, sea kale, sea lettuce and samphire atop custardy Rainton Tomme cheese.
Commitment to sustainability and nose-to-tail cooking has earned the restaurant a Michelin Green Star for outstanding sustainability initiatives. There are six stand-alone cabins with panoramic views of mountains and Loch Fyne (dinner £95, wine pairings are an additional £65; lunch can be ordered a la carte; overnight, starts at £195 and includes breakfast but not dinner).
On a family farm in a fertile pocket of Angus, between Dundee and Aberdeen, Arbikie Distillery is pioneering single-estate spirits with hardcore sustainability practices. The brothers John, Iain and David Stirling, all in their 50s, founded a field-to-bottle distillery in 2013 and, within five years, introduced a rye Scotch whisky (one hadn’t been made in Scotland in more than a century, the distillery says). In 2020, they created what they say are the world’s first climate-positive spirits, by planting peas and beans which reverse the distillery’s carbon output.
In terms of flavour, their spirits have a taste of the terroir, since all ingredients originate on the farm. Next up? Installing a wind turbine to power the distillery with green hydrogen. Arbikie offers tastings at its distillery seven days a week from 10am to 6pm; £25.
As if being a woman at the helm of a start-from-scratch whisky brand was not innovative enough, 40-year-old Annabel Thomas has made herself known on the sustainability front. In 2020, Thomas bottled her first batch of Nc’nean at the company’s remote West Highlands distillery, which is an hour and a half drive from Fort William and requires a ferry crossing. Within two years, the company had attained B Corporation status, which signifies that it has met certain standards for social and environmental performance, and achieved net zero emissions for its own operations.
Thomas also bucks tradition on the flavour front. Her whisky, which does not adhere to classic ageing practices, is light, citrusy and unpeated. “Classic whisky is designed for 70-year-olds. I wanted to create something for the new generation, a contemporary looking, lighter-tasting product that is transparent about environmental impact,” she said. The company currently offers a single-malt whiskey, a gin-like botanical spirit and a seasonal small-batch whisky called Huntress that experiments with yeast. Nc’nean offers two daily tours, Monday through Friday, at 10am and 2pm; £18. Private tours are also available.
On St Andrews Square in Edinburgh, Gleneagles Townhouse is a re-imagined 19th-century bank that pulses with 21st-century glamour, from its stunning glass-domed restaurant, the Spence, where pink, green and blue velvet sofas offer birds-eye views of ornate plasterwork, to its 33 rooms, each individually outfitted with tasselled crown-canopy headboards, antique-looking chandeliers and rugs, plus marble-floored bathrooms, many with free-standing bathtubs.
Since the property opened in June 2022, the Spence has become the city’s social hub, a stylish perch for all-day brasserie-style food and fanciful cocktails (doubles from £450 per night; entree prices range from £17 to 45).
When Manuela and Iwan Wirth of the acclaimed contemporary art gallery Hauser & Wirth opened the Fife Arms, their renovated Victorian coach inn in 2018, the Highlands town of Braemar became a destination for design aficionados. The hotel is a glorious mashup of art, culture and history, where a Picasso is hung upon tartan-clad walls and set off by a ceiling mural by Chinese artist Zhang Enli, and a watercolour by Queen Victoria hangs a few paces from a hot-pink cocktail bar dedicated to Elsa Schiaparelli.
Each of the 46 wildly cosy rooms salutes a notable Scot or visitor to the region (for example, Flora Macdonald, a hero of the Jacobite movement) and brims with character in the form of eye-catching wall coverings, curated bric-a-brac and artwork. This being the Highlands, the great outdoors beckons. Ghillies, or local guides, are on tap for horseback riding, fly-fishing, birding and hiking in Cairngorms National Park (doubles from £600 per night).
With its widely spread out attractions, wind-whipped landscape and lack of public transport, Scotland can be challenging to tackle on your own. Highland Explorer Tours offers bus-based group tours ranging from single-day outings to the Highlands (highlight: flying across the arched Glenfinnan viaduct on the Jacobite Steam Train, also known as Hogwarts Express from the Harry Potter films, £185pp) to six-day trips with stops in Orkney, Isle of Skye and the beaches along the North Coast 500 (£1509pp). Rabbie’s Tours offers one-day (£54) and four-day (£209 without lodging) Outlander-themed tours centred on filming locations.
Another high-end option is to whiz past the scenery aboard Belmond’s Royal Scotsman, an old-world train with wood-panelled sleeping cabins and fine dining. The journeys, which depart from Edinburgh, range from two to seven nights and include off-train excursions such as whiskey tastings and clay pigeon shooting on a private estate (rates start at £4500pp for two nights).
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Writer: Amy Tara Koch
Photos: Robert Ormerod
When there's nothing as far as the eye can see, you may appreciate the company.