"In Scotland, we don't go in for that lazy criticism, not even in an ironic way"
A conversation with Chitra Ramaswamy, Scotland's restaurant critic + recommendations for Scotland’s best restaurants.
Welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today, we have a special issue in which Jonathan Nunn sits down with Chitra Ramaswamy, Scotland restaurant critic for the Times.
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In conversation with The Times’ Chitra Ramaswamy
Chitra Ramaswamy’s name doesn’t always come up when people talk about our national restaurant critics. Though she is a celebrated journalist and author in her own right, she is rarely, if ever, included in lists of review roundups. This isn’t to chastise anyone: even as someone whose job it is to know these things, I only found out that Chitra was reviewing in 2022 after a friend recommended her work to me; at this point, she was already two years into her stint as the restaurant critic for Alba, the Scotland-only supplement of The Times.
Her absence from these circles may have something to do with the marginal position of Scotland in a London-centric media ecosystem. But it may also be because Chitra has a triply-unique role. First of all, she is the only critic whose remit is a single country, rather than London, or the UK. Secondly, her reviews do not sell themselves on bombast, or her personal story, but veer closer to the tradition of informed service journalism, perfected in London by Fay Maschler, or by Jonathan Gold in Los Angeles – restaurant writing for people who might actually go to the restaurant. Thirdly, and I believe this is significant, she is, to the best of my knowledge, the only woman of colour to have ever worked in a British restaurant critic role at a national newspaper.
Over the last few years, I have learnt more from reading Chitra’s work than I have from any other British restaurant writer. Though she has lived in Scotland half her life, she is also an outsider, and her writing is marked by a sense of curiosity and care that I often find missing in our review culture. Though her remit is small, it includes two of the country’s most progressive dining scenes – in Edinburgh and Glasgow – as well as the increasing number of destination restaurants in the countryside and the accompanying revolution in Scottish produce. There is no better time to have this role: I am sure that, in a few decades, Chitra’s backlog of reviews will be one of the most comprehensive primary sources on how the country’s food and restaurant culture has transformed.
I sat down with Chitra last month at Thenga, a vegan café in King’s Cross to talk about how Scottish food has changed in the last 30 years, Glasgow’s and Edinburgh’s differing restaurant scenes, the pitfalls of gentrified bakery discourse, the experience of being a woman of colour in a critic’s position and why you should never make blanket assumptions about anywhere in Scotland. Plus, all the restaurant recommendations you need to scratch the surface of one of the best places in the country to eat.
Jonathan: What is it like to be a restaurant critic in a country that has been routinely insulted, mainly by outsiders, for its food?
Chitra: The interesting thing now is that I don't think Scottish cuisine is derided like that anymore. There's been a huge sea change – I was going to say ‘particularly in the cities’, but actually I don't think it is. I've officially lived in Scotland for more than half my life now, more or less evenly split between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in that time Scotland has managed to come out from under that image: those very tired old tropes of people steaming on the streets and eating deep-fried Mars bars. I think Scotland now, quite rightly, regards itself as a country with an unparalleled larder, fantastic chefs and a distinct and evolving modern national cuisine.
In Scotland, we don't go in for that lazy criticism, not even in an ironic way. I don't write like that, and nor do I read other writers writing like that. Scottish food writers tend to be focused on Scottish produce, place, questions around land ownership and privatisation, whatever window you're looking through to talk about food. But when English writers come to Scotland, I do notice – without naming any names – that those lazy clichés and stereotypes are quickly fallen back upon.
Jonathan: Do you think that the revolution that’s happened in modern British food has manifested in a different way in Scotland to, say, London, or is it just a slower way?
Chitra: I think that's really interesting – it's almost a question about national identity in Scotland, but in London it's a question about London identity, which is obviously completely separate from a sense of English identity. I was thinking about this on the train down: there was a time when Scotland was in the grip of a dialogue about the indy ref and it felt like independence was on the horizon. That has obviously changed now, but for a certain period of time Scotland was almost preparing to see itself as independent. And it was gaining a greater sense of a national food identity as well.
I've noticed that this has manifested in mid-range to fine dining restaurants in Scotland through a real identification with the Nordic countries and Scotland becoming almost Scandi in its approach. It liked to think of itself in that way politically as well, so it's no surprise to me that it also started to look that way, both in terms of interior design and also the food on the plate.
Jonathan: There’s this passage in the introduction of Florence White's book, Good Things in England, which was written in the 1930s, where she’s talking about English cooking and saying we should stop comparing England to France and that ‘the Scots kitchen owes more to France than does our English kitchen’. But she mentions that we should learn from the Scandinavian countries instead, which I think has been borne out since in London, with the influence of New Nordic cuisine. But of course this makes more sense with Scotland because it is much more geographically aligned.
Chitra: Exactly. You do see quite a lot of Nordic influences in modern Scottish cuisine – particularly around ways of preservation, even ways of plating. And I welcome it. I think it's made Scotland inhabit the best of itself and I feel like it has a progressive, small-but-outward-looking, slightly more internationalist vibe to its food and politics, even as England has felt like it’s becoming more reactionary and insular. That's the happiest interpretation of it – I'm sure there are millions of ways in which that doesn't show.
Jonathan: Pam Brunton’s Inver in Argyll is one of my favourite restaurants in the country, and the relationship it has to produce feels like a Scottish response to something like Fäviken, where it’s not just about a meal on the plate, but the surroundings, and the time you spend in the place where that meal was produced. And maybe that wouldn't have been possible without rediscovering that, actually, when you go back to the produce, it ranks with the best in the world; you can do something new with the cuisine if you return to the ingredient.
Chitra: Exactly. And using a lot of those techniques around preservation and fermentation and pickling and canning and things that have become sexy in recent years, but of course are some of the oldest cooking techniques in the world. I feel like Scotland's very on it with all of that. Inver is a brilliant example, but there are loads now. I recently reviewed a cafe in Marchmont, Edinburgh, called Mara’s Picklery, which is committed to using these techniques to preserve and enhance local produce, mainly vegetables. The Little Chartroom in Leith, where I live, Fallachan Kitchen in Glasgow, and Fhior, Timberyard and Montrose in Edinburgh are other examples. Scotland feels like a very exciting place to live in terms of food, and there are a lot of people engaged in the politics of it. Just look at the well-documented travesty of salmon farming; now you go into a lot of restaurants in the mid-end [price range], not just the high-end, where you won't see salmon on menus, it’s all chalk stream trout. That's a huge sea change.
When I first arrived in Glasgow in 1997, most of Scotland's produce wasn't staying in Scotland. It all felt like it was all going to Paris, Spain and so on. I interviewed Roberta Hall-McCarron, who runs The Little Chartroom, recently: she's got three restaurants in Edinburgh and is at the forefront of modern Scottish cuisine. She was saying that after she finished catering college in Glasgow, she did a stint at the Burj Al Arab and the first thing she saw when she walked in was Scottish langoustines.
Jonathan: This is a cheap question, but I'm going to ask anyway. If you had a visitor and they were interested in experiencing the best of what Scotland has to offer in terms of food, what would you advise them to do? It could be a restaurant, it could be an area, it could be an itinerary, it could be just a way of looking at food.