We’ve waxed lyrical about Edinburgh’s exciting food scene over the last few years, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when this gleaming jewel was more of a culinary backwater. As is often the case, it took the vision of a few to open the door for the many; the likes of Tom Kitchin and Martin Wishart helped to turn the tide in Edinburgh by championing Scottish ingredients. Now a new generation of chefs are following in their wake, transforming the Scottish capital into one of the UK’s most progressive food cities.
Roberta Hall-McCarron is one of those chefs. She was born and raised in Edinburgh, but it wasn’t the city that inspired her to start cooking – what resonates instead are memories of holidays on Scotland’s blustery coastline. ‘My Dad had a boat so I spent a lot of my childhood on the west coast,’ she says. ‘We used to go sailing every summer. When I think about food as a child, I think about eating mussels and langoustines and scallops, knowing they’d just come in off the boats.’
The name of Roberta’s restaurant – The Little Chartroom – points vigorously towards that inspiration (a chartroom being the room on a ship where charts are read). ‘I’ve always been a better chef than I am a sailor!’ she laughs, ‘but I always had a huge interest in food, from a really young age. When I was fifteen at school we had to do a couple of weeks’ work experience somewhere – I wasn’t really sure what to do, but my parents suggested I go and work in a restaurant. So I wrote to a few of them, got a placement for a week and that was it – I just fell in love with it.’