Stuart Ralston never imagined that he would become a hotelier. In fact, the Scottish chef had no concrete plans for his career, other than to own his own restaurant one day. “Everything else has come about by accident or grown organically into what it is,” Ralston tells the Observer, speaking from one of his Michelin-starred restaurants. Lylain Edinburgh at the end of March. “When I started as a chef, I didn’t know anything.”
Ralston opened his first restaurant, Aizlein Edinburgh in 2014. Since then, he has opened a number of restaurants around the city, including Swim in 2019, Business AND Lyla in 2023 and It comes in 2025. Earlier this year, it added a hotel component to Lyla. The four bedrooms, located above Lyla in a historic house near Edinburgh city centre, were previously run by someone else. Ralston had the opportunity to acquire them last year and then engaged design firm Scarnish Studio to renovate the rooms and bring them in line with Lyla’s contemporary and stylish decor.
Scarnish Studio originally designed Lyla’s dining room, as well as Ralston’s restaurants Vinette and Vivian. “I wanted the rooms to feel as high-end as the restaurant, and I wanted them to feel individually designed, so they’re not all the same,” says Ralston, 42. “I don’t like the idea of having a cookie-cutter process. They each have different characteristics, so it makes more sense to work around those characteristics.”
Ralston used his travel experiences to ensure that each room felt comfortable and well appointed. “I’ve seen a lot of hotels,” he says. “I wanted something where you feel a little bit like home, and you have things that you need. Music, house cocktails — things like that.” The minibar also includes Caviar caviar for £50 and a bottle of Krug Grand Cuvee MV for £350.
“I work a lot with caviar,” Ralston explains. “So to have something that really relates to the restaurant and what we do in the restaurant felt important. It’s a weird thing to put in there, too, to keep it feeling classy and elegant. There’s a lot of places where you get absolute garbage.”
In the morning, an included breakfast is delivered to the room in a stylish picnic basket. Initially, Ralston considered serving it in the restaurant downstairs, but the space seemed too large for just a few hotel guests. He took inspiration from a place he stayed at on Lummi Island, where they offered a variety of items instead of a cooked breakfast.
“It’s very nice to have breakfast in bed,” he says. “I can send you all the things I think you’ll like in the morning and that’s an extension of the quality of the restaurant. Also, you eat a lot of food at Lyla. So in the morning, I don’t think you’re looking for a big breakfast. You want something more precise and select.”
Opening hotel rooms is a calculated risk for Ralston, although in a turbulent hospitality industry, he thinks they can be a safe bet. “Rooms are pretty bulletproof economically,” he notes, pointing to Edinburgh’s popularity with visitors. “Edinburgh is a tourist town, so there’s always a need for hotel rooms. Running a high-end restaurant like Lyla’s is quite expensive, so the profit margins are next to nothing. We might as well make the most of everything we have in the building.”
Lyla’s rooms, which start from £295 per night, operate separately from the restaurant. Although many guests will likely book for the 10-course tasting menu, Ralston knows others will come just for the hotel. The dining experience at Lyla is a long one—my dinner lasted more than three hours—so it’s a bonus to be able to crawl upstairs after you’re done. “There’s no waiting for guests,” Ralston says. “As long as the rooms and the restaurant are filled independently, it’s fine.”
Ralston’s clear vision of Lyla is well established. The gourmet restaurant, which received its Michelin star in 2025, emphasizes local seafood, occasionally drawing on global influences such as Japanese techniques. Although Ralston is from Scotland and has established himself as one of Edinburgh’s top chefs, he doesn’t consider the food itself Scottish. “My food is a reflection of the places I’ve lived and worked in,” he says, noting his years in New York working in the now-closed malls. Gordon Ramsay in London had a great influence on him. “We’re using mainly Scottish produce in the restaurants, but with influences and techniques from around the world.”
It was Ramsay who taught Ralston, who moved to New York at age 22, how to channel a specific culinary vision. “Gordon had a very distinct style of food with a French connection throughout the menu,” he recalls. “We would never put anything wild in there, for example. You wouldn’t have wasabi on the menu, for example. But also, I think living in New York probably did a lot for me as well. There were a lot of different styles, like, ‘This is a Cuban restaurant and this is what they do.’ They’re not dirty with cheeseburgers. They’re doing Cuban food.”
The chef implements this idea in all his restaurants. Each has a specific identity. Noto is his version of a Japanese pub, Tipo serves pasta and Lyla is eating well. Ralston ensures that everyone he hires at each restaurant is serving that particular vision. But he also spends a lot of time at each restaurant, helping to channel his inspiration through the chefs. Currently, his only day off is Sunday.
“It’s about allowing the chefs to have some kind of freedom, but with the control that I have to say yes to everything that goes on a menu,” he says, noting that everything on his menus goes through him first. It is an extremely unforgiving recognition. “Because no matter which way you kill it, nobody’s going to care about brands as much as I do, and they’re never going to see it the way I do,” he adds.
Ralston has become a mainstay in Edinburgh, but he hasn’t always lived there. He grew up in Glenrothes and spent his early years as a chef working around Scotland. After seven years in New York, he moved to England to work Lower Slaughters Manor House in the Cotswolds. His next job was in Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados, where he stayed for three years. When he felt it was time to open his own restaurant, Ralston decided to base himself in Edinburgh. It was financially more secure than New York or London. But Ralston had trouble finding a job in Scotland, which he needed to make the move.
“I was gone for so long that no one knew who I was,” he recalls. “I felt a bit bummed about it, like nobody in my country had any clue about my career or the things I’d done. I had to prove to myself that I could come home and re-establish myself. But actually, now looking back, it was the best thing because it made me work a lot harder to make sure I was really good at what I was doing.”
After 11 years in two different locations, Ralston decided to close Aizle in the fall of 2025. It hadn’t been the same since he opened Lyla, where he devoted most of his time and energy. The food was good, but it wasn’t the same as it was in the heyday. And being inside the Kimpton Hotel was a challenge.
“Everything was telling me, ‘Yeah, it’s time to call it,'” Ralston says. “I always said if I felt like it was becoming one of those restaurants where people are like, ‘Well, it used to be really good, but now it’s not so good,’ I would move on. So I made the tough decision to take it down. The reason we opened Vinet and Vivian is because I didn’t want to lose all those staff that had worked for me.”
It was a difficult decision, but also one that came with some relief. “It gave me closure for a lot of reasons—some professional, some personal,” Ralston says. “To not be burdened by something. A lot of people really liked that restaurant. The amount of people that have come up to me and told me about significant times in their lives that they spent at that restaurant is amazing. So it was like: Everybody loved it. It’s been a good run. Now we can just put it to bed.”
Ralston now has four restaurants and a bar, but his focus is on Lyla. It is the only restaurant where they regularly cook in the kitchen. He is constantly inspired by the seasonality of produce in Scotland and Great Britain and changes dishes often, sometimes because a new ingredient is available, such as rhubarb or asparagus, and sometimes because he is bored. “It has to feel like, ‘This is better than what we’re currently doing and it’s a step forward’ for us to change things,” he notes. “The langoustine dish hasn’t changed because people love it so much and I’m not sick of it either. I love it.”
For Ralston, Lyla represents all the things he thinks about “with food and professional creativity.” The dishes are artistic and complex, and the service is extremely precise. Everything in the dining room and kitchen has been carefully considered – an approach that also extends to the bedrooms upstairs.
“I worked a lot on how things look and feel and how you eat them and how that translates into a dining experience on the menu,” says the chef. “Because not everyone will see how complicated things are – there’s a lot of work that goes into some things that look really simple. Every time we do something, it’s about the combination of the plate, the color, the texture, the flavor, what it’s going to be served with, which plate suits it best, at what point in the meal it’s served. That’s where nobody can get something very unique. There’s no system to it. It’s a feeling.
Dining and sleeping at Lyla reflect that unique feel that Ralston wants to convey. The rooms are comfortable and cozy, but also stylish and elegant – the kind of place where you spin the lamps to see if you can buy one for yourself. The tasting menu, which costs £185 for dinner, £79 for a five-course lunch and £105 for a seven-course lunch, looks like a trip. Everything evokes something, even if you’re not quite sure what it is. Chawanmushi – a Japanese custard – was served with fresh spring peas and bacon. It was the best thing I’ve eaten this year and totally special. It brought with it the hope of spring, but also the feeling of a distant place.
“Dishes have to have a personality,” says Ralston. “They can’t be filling. And everything has to be tasty – that’s the most important thing. In my restaurants, there’s not a single dish on the group’s menus that I don’t like to eat, from a salad to a soup to a pasta. These are the flavors and foods that I like. That’s why we never put turnips on the menus, because we’ll never bring turnips back. Everything we do has to be valuable, or we shouldn’t do it.”
Ralston’s controlled and thoughtful approach always comes through, whether it’s on specific dishes or in Lyla’s bedrooms—proof that a singular vision can have impressive results.
