After a string of successful previous ventures, Stuart Ralston was awarded a Michelin star at Lyla in Edinburgh.
The Scottish chef produces fine dining seafood, celebrating the best the local waters have to offer, at his 28-cover Georgian townhouse.
Stuart opened Lyla in 2023, earning a Michelin star less than two years later, in February 2025.
Speaking to The Staff Canteen at the awards ceremony in Glasgow, Stuart said: “It’s just big validation of a lot of years cooking and not feeling like I’ve wasted my time.”
Stuart came from a family of chefs. Having started out as a kitchen porter as a teenager, Stuart would go on to follow in his parents’ and siblings’ footsteps and don the chef whites himself.
He worked at The Roman Camp Hotel, Greywalls Hotel and Michelin-starred Inverlochy Castle, before linking up with Gordon Ramsay, sealing a job at his London Hotel in New York.
He returned to England to work at Lower Slaughter Manor in the Cotswolds, winning three AA rosettes.
A spell in Barbados followed, before moving back home, to Scotland in 2014.
Lyla was his fourth Edinburgh-based restaurant, a more refined offering after Aizle, Noto and Tipo.
“I don’t think of myself as a restaurateur, but I do love restaurants and filling the city with things I don’t think are there,” said Stuart.
“All the experiences I’ve had around the world come into that one particular building and have given us this award,” he said.
“It’s obviously our most refined offering, our most ambitious, it’s split over two levels, an open kitchen.
“A lot of the chefs are serving things and finishing things at the table, so it has a very personal experience and it’s just very intimate, it’s very small. It’s just a nice place of tranquillity.”
Lyla has two menus. There is a five or seven-course lunch menu, which Stuart describes as “a little bit simpler, a little bit quicker, but a little bit lighter” and its 10-course tasting dinner menu.
The menu’s components and concepts changes less frequently than its seasonal produce does. The team cooks a limited amount of dietary requirements to focus on what Lyla specialises in, which is predominantly a fish and seafood restaurant, with a lot of raw fish on the menu along with organic meats and vegetables.
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