One day in Tokyo, a particular craving for salt beef bagels took hold. ‘Of course you cannot buy a salt beef bagel in Tokyo, so I had to make it all from scratch’ Tom recounts. ‘It took me a week. I did everything: I cured my beef at home and made the bagels from scratch. It was quite a lot of effort for just two bagels.’

Alongside recreating the home comforts Tom missed from Britain, he embraced and experimented with the best Japanese produce he could find. Sharing a story of how he bought a huge King Crab at the famed Tsukiji fish market: his art-school style process of creativity shines forth. This was learning without boundaries, rules, or a sense of what a cook “should” do.

Moving back to the UK, the pair decided to amplify their love of food and wine with a solid grounding. Matilda notes that her familial connection to wine, alongside her personal passion, prompted her to begin a WSET course ‘just for fun’ with Tom taking his cookery training into more established routes too, through the famed Leith's School. This new grounding gave the pair the confidence to begin a supper club, run from their South London flat. 

‘When we set up the supper club, we had ten people round the table at our tiny flat in East Dulwich', Matilda recalls, 'I’d finish work on a Friday and come straight home to serve’.  

The supper club proved successful but short lived: the pandemic forbade gatherings of such a nature and their burgeoning operation became impossible to continue. Matilda’s work had shifted, and remembering the monotony of that time, said: ‘I was spending each day from 6:00am until god knows when at night just glued to a Teams screen. I remember having to wake up early to go to the shop just to get toilet rolls. It wasn’t a great time’. 

But Matilda had roots in Scotland, having grown up in Fife, and like many during this time, the couple decided to leave the city and take the plunge. ‘I had a yearning to go back to the countryside in Scotland, and we had this vague idea that we wanted to do something food and wine related. I think at that time, Tom had a much clearer vision than I did, I just needed to get out of London’.

Previously the Killiecrankie Hotel, Tom and Matilda came across the southern Cairngorms property in May 2021, and quickly got the keys in November of that same year. ‘That’s when the real hard work started’ Matilda notes. Redoing the architecture, managing the local council and renovating the space took almost a year. Undertaking a multitude of complex projects at the same time seems second nature to this couple: two who are curious, determined, ambitious and above all, capable. 

‘About two months before opening, we got married. Everyone was like “you’re f**king mad” organising a wedding, plus opening Killiecrankie House...then we had a daughter’. Tom mentions that part of the reason the pair moved to this part of the world was to start a family, but both Matilda and Tom are self-aware enough to know that they took on a lot at once.

‘There's never a good time with a lot of these things,’ Matilda contests happily. ‘You just have to go for it. Honestly? If we’d have known about the struggles and challenges of this place in particular, we might have been put off: you have to go into it with a good chunk of naivete or you’ll never have a go’. Tom recalls after the birth of their daughter: ‘Matilda would do service with her bobbing around in her pouch. But, we’re a family restaurant, this is our style’. 

That blend of confidence, impatience and a willingness to make things work no matter the challenge sets Tom and Matilda apart. This is a couple who have wrought the idea for a remote, fine-dining restaurant and luxurious place to stay up from the ground, and who hold it together with the hands of a team fully invested in their ideals. 

The food at Killiecrankie is Tom’s vision. It began as a ten-course offering, spanning Scotland’s finest produce, but the pair confess that they’d reigned themselves in during those early days.

Whether in an effort to better establish themselves in this new arena or as a realisation that to achieve what they truly wanted to, there were to be years of growth and evolution ahead: what eating at Killiecrankie House would one day become, was a dream the duo hadn't yet realised.  

In the beginning the restaurant focussed on what Tom describes as ‘external stories’: a demonstration of Scottish produce that was delicious, but perhaps less personal. ‘Now the stories are about us, and we’re less worried about doing something that people might perceive as unusual.’ 

Tom is a great lover of the restaurant Mugaritz near San Sebastian, Spain, a truly avant-garde space where some 30-40 bites are presented to each diner in a marathon meal lasting hours. Tom is trying to capture some of the essence of such an experience at Killiecrankie House, but perhaps in a more accessible and informal way.

His food is centered around dishes that last just a few bites, taking the plates away ‘at their peak deliciousness’ to avoid what he calls ‘the risotto effect’. This is essentially the monotony a diner might experience when eating multiple bites of the same thing. The logic? No matter how perfect the risotto might be, the first and second bites will be the most enjoyable, with bites five and six getting repetitive. 

Describing the guest experience now, Tom says: ‘It’s delicious, it’s beautiful, it’s interesting. Our kitchen is in the middle of the room, our chefs run the dishes to the table, everything is on show, like a test kitchen. It’s an adventure’. 

To fully realise this adventure requires a growing team. Fortunately chefs Hugh and Jake have been in the kitchen with Tom since day one, helping to establish a solid grounding in this remote location. Growing the team to grow the dining offering also means growing the dining room; but evolution will be slow. 

Plans range from adding six covers to the dining room and doubling the kitchen footprint to having each table looked after by a single chef and server for the entire meal. These are the ambitions that only the most determined of chefs can hope to realise. 

‘We’ve got to the point where we know what we’re good at’ Matilda assuredly states. These days, Clive – the head gardener – and Tom sit down together to discuss what is continuing to grow well and Tom’s creativity is unleashed. In a lounge where guests choose the records they’d like to hear while sipping their welcome drinks, bookshelves gurn with the weight of every legendary chefs’ cookbook. Tom takes his inspiration from all, traversing his affinity of Spanish maximalism with his personal connection to East Asia via the exceptional produce at his doorstep. 

Along with confidence and willing, a healthy disregard for what other people might constitute as 'the rules' has helped Matilda and Tom Tsappis go from a small South London supper club to now owning and operating one of the best restaurants in Scotland. 

Something that's apparent from dining at Killiecrankie, and understanding Tom and Matilda as people, is a feeling of quiet restlessness. Driven by an intense intellectual curiosity and a sense of adventure, Killiecrankie House is the result of a sparkling gastronomic duo showcasing their tastefully-assembled ethos of what eating out should be, with exceptional results.