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At Edinburgh’s Timberyard, Chef Bart Stratfold Wants to Define New Scottish Cuisine

At the Michelin-starred restaurant, wild Scottish ingredients, preservation and low-waste cooking shape a distinctly modern approach to fine dining.

For Bart Stratfold, the ethos of Timberyard is simple: the ingredients should be “as best as possible and from as close as possible.” That’s the approach the chef takes to every dish on the Edinburgh restaurant’s menu, which showcases the plants, seafood, and meat that come from the region. It can be seen on the pickle plate, which includes a pine cone, and throughout the softs pairing, created with foraged, fermented components like fig leaves and sea buckthorn. Even if something comes from slightly farther away, like citrus from Spain, it has to have a provenance and a narrative.

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“We’re willing to use the citrus because Scotland was the first country to commercially sell and produce marmalade,” Stratfold tells Observer. “But I get excited sourcing amazing things from where we are. I know everyone talks about seasonality, and everyone talks about local, but there are different levels of seasonality and locality. The reality is that restaurants are not a sustainable entity. If you look at the energy consumption of a busy restaurant, it’s far higher than the equivalent consumption of everybody cooking for themselves at home. So we have to be as responsible as possible.”

Part of that responsibility is only using wild meat. Stratfold’s one exception is pork—Timberyard acquires about 10 pigs each year and always uses the entire animal, mostly curing the various cuts of meat and preserving the fat. 

“They come from one particular butcher,” Stratfold says. “And I have to know about the pigs and their origin. So the butcher constantly sends me photos, and then I pick and choose. He knows what breeds I like. He knows the fat cap I like. He knows if there’s a story behind it that will sway me. That’s the same with my fishmonger: He sends me photos of fish, telling me where it’s from and sending me videos of the fisherman landing it.”

Stratfold joined Timberyard, which opened in 2012, three years ago, under its previous executive chef, James Murray. Before that, he worked at Coombeshead Farm, a farm-to-table guesthouse and restaurant in Cornwall that grows........

© Observer