Lyla has been winning praise across the board for its homage to Scotland's seafood. Rosie Conroy finds out how Stuart Ralston has made it stand out
"I strongly believe that you don't have a million genius ideas as a chef in your lifetime – you've maybe got 30," says Scottish-born chef Stuart Ralston, reflecting on the change of tack he took when opening Lyla, his fourth Edinburgh restaurant and the final place he says you'll find him behind the pass.
This swan song is decidedly more him than anything he's done before and the culmination of a career that spans decades and continents working for some of the world's biggest names, including Gordon Ramsay.
At Ralston's first solo project, Aizle, the chef changed the menu daily, an approach he's countering now with Lyla, where he says the billing will rarely rotate. "As I've got older the need for revolution is less, and I think evolving dishes to become better is now more important to me than constantly coming up with new things. Each dish has an individualistic character so nothing's repeated. There's a boldness to that which I think is memorable for people."
Creating 10 courses of distinctly different food would be enough of a challenge in itself, but Lyla is fish-focused, making the pressure more intense. Ralston has a few tricks to ensure variation that range from limiting the quantity of flavours on each dish to presentation.
"Crockery really lends itself to new dishes and how you do things," he says. "I've spent more time on crockery at Lyla than ever before – it sparks a lot of ideas."
One such dish is a langoustine served on a footed stand that Ralston says inspired him to create a dish that you eat with your hands. His rationale is that cutlery elongates your reach, so if you're going to eat with your hands, your food should be closer to you. Here the offering is a single langoustine neatly wrapped in kataifi pastry which is deep-fried and then topped with grated, smoked and dried scallop roe that acts like a katsuobushi. This is served with mayonnaise, apple ketchup and herbs, for an equilibrium of salt, fat and acid.
"When I first made it I wasn't confident, I said it's way too simple. I didn't think anyone would be impressed with it, but as soon as we put it on the menu everyone loved it."
Joining the surprise signatures is another seemingly simple dish and Ralston's favourite thing to eat: bread and butter. "It was a total nightmare to get right. It took us three months to perfect the recipe," he says.The process for perfection starts weeks in advance with the dough pre-batched and then slowly fermented before being baked twice a day, every day. It's become so popular that Ralston has to make extra to allow for seconds and take-home requests.
The only meat dish on the menu is a small piece of wagyu served with a sweet and sour black walnut ketchup and a rich bone marrow gravy. It's complex but comforting and the result of many painstaking rounds of testing. The meat is barbecued for smokiness, brushed with a gastrique of sugar, butter, vinegar and black garlic and then topped with a shallot relish, which Ralston says offsets the funkiness of the aged meat in a way that a pickle might work with a cheese. On the side there's a salad of radicchio, truffle and crispy beef bits hiding KFC-style fried sweetbreads – a considered choice made to present offal in a more accessible way to the masses.
Looking back on the growth from his first restaurant to now, Ralston considers the two worlds apart. At Lyla, it's the first time he's "having a crack at a restaurant where there's zero compromise". Here he wants to go out on a high, with ambitions of being "the best restaurant in Scotland, and after that being the best in the UK… I want to see how far we can take this," he adds. Despite his grand plans, this year Lyla was left off of the hallowed Michelin list, which Ralston admits stung, but is something he says won't dictate how he runs his restaurant.
"I strongly believe awards will come if your work has integrity," he says. "Internally our focus isn't on getting that star, it's on making sure we're getting that 1% better every day and everything else will follow."
From the menu
- Lobster, kohlrabi and sake
- Cured turbot with radish and Exmoor caviar
- Scottish langoustine with burnt apple and sorrel
- Chawanmushi with smoked trout and marigold
- Laminated brioche with cultured butter and wild garlic capers
- Pumpkin with spenwood and winter truffles
- Wild halibut with Jerusalem artichoke and N25 caviar
- Wagyu beef with onion and black walnut
- Laganory, hibiscus and flowered lavosh
- Yorkshire rhubarb, red pepper and goats' milk
- Chocolate, barley koji and salted milk
- Petit fours: praline bonbon, coffee croux craquelin, pear and rum canelé, paloma patte de fruit
10-course tasting menu, £165 per person
3 Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB
