At Edinburgh’s Lyla, Stuart Ralston Extends Hospitality Upstairs

Stuart Ralston never imagined he would become a hotelier. In fact, the Scottish chef had no concrete plans for his career, beyond owning his own restaurant one day. “Everything else has come up by chance or organically grown into what it is,” Ralston tells Observer, speaking from his one Michelin-starred restaurant, Lyla, in Edinburgh in late March. “When I started as a chef, I didn’t know anything.”

Ralston opened his first restaurant, Aizle, in Edinburgh in 2014. Since then, he has launched a succession of eateries around the city, including Noto in 2019, Tipo and Lyla in 2023, and Vinette in 2025. Earlier this year, he added a hotel component to Lyla. The four bedrooms, located above Lyla in a historic townhouse close to Edinburgh’s city center, were previously run by someone else. Ralston had the opportunity to take them over last year and subsequently enlisted design firm Scarnish Studio to renovate the rooms and bring them in line with Lyla’s contemporary, elegant decor. 

Scarnish Studio initially 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. Each of them has different features, so it makes more sense to work around those features.”

Ralston drew on his own travel experiences to ensure each room felt comfortable and well-appointed. “I’ve seen a lot of hotels,” he says. “I wanted something where you would feel it’s a bit like a home, and you’ve got things that you need. Music, homemade cocktails—those sorts of things.” The minibar even includes Kaviari caviar for £50 and a bottle of Krug Grand Cuvee MV for £350. 

“I work with caviar a lot,” Ralston explains. “So to have something that really ties in with the restaurant and what we do in the restaurant felt important. It’s a bougie thing to put in there, as well, to keep it feeling high-end and elegant. There are a lot of places where you get absolute rubbish.”

In the morning, an included breakfast is delivered to the room in a chic picnic basket. Originally, Ralston considered serving it in the restaurant downstairs, but the space seemed too grand for only a few hotel guests. He took inspiration from a place he stayed on Lummi Island, where they offered a spread of items rather than a cooked breakfast. 

“It’s quite nice to have breakfast in bed,” he says. “I can deliver you all the things that I think you would enjoy in the morning and have it be an extension of the restaurant’s quality. 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 picky and choosy.”

Opening hotel rooms is a calculated risk for Ralston, although in a tumultuous hospitality industry, he thinks they might be a surefire bet. “Rooms are economically pretty bulletproof,” he notes, pointing to Edinburgh’s popularity with visitors. “Edinburgh is a tourist city, so there is always a need for hotel rooms. Running a high-end restaurant like Lyla is pretty expensive, so the profit margins are next to nothing. We may as well take advantage of everything we have in the building.” 

Lyla’s rooms, which start at £295 per night, operate separately from the restaurant. Although many guests will likely book in for the 10-course tasting menu, Ralston knows that others will come just for the hotel. The dining experience at Lyla is lengthy—my dinner ran more than three hours—so it’s a bonus to be able to crawl upstairs once you’re done. “There are no expectations for the guests,” Ralston says. “As long as both the rooms and the restaurant are independently full, that’s fine.”

Ralston’s clear vision for Lyla is well-established. The fine-dining restaurant, which received its Michelin star in 2025, emphasizes local seafood, occasionally drawing on global influences, like Japanese techniques. Although Ralston is from Scotland and has established himself as one of the top chefs in Edinburgh, he doesn’t consider the food itself to be Scottish. “My food is a reflection of the places I’ve lived and worked,” he says, noting that his years in New York City working at the now-shuttered Gordon Ramsay at The London had a big impact on him. “We’re mainly using mostly Scottish products in the restaurants, but with influences and techniques from around the world.”

It was Ramsay who taught Ralston, who moved to New York at 22, how to channel a specific culinary vision. “Gordon had a very clear style of food with a French link all the way through the menu,” he remembers. “We’d never put anything wild on there, either. You wouldn’t have wasabi on the menu, for example. But also, I think living in New York probably really did a lot for me, too. There were so many different styles, like, ‘This is a Cuban restaurant, and that’s what they do.’ They’re not fucking about with cheeseburgers. They’re doing Cuban food.”

The chef applies that idea to all of his restaurants. Each has a specific identity. Noto is his version of a Japanese pub, Tipo serves pasta, and Lyla is fine dining. Ralston ensures that everyone he hires at each eatery is serving that particular vision. But he also spends a lot of time in each restaurant, helping channel his inspiration through the chefs. Currently, his only day off is Sunday. 

“It’s about allowing the chefs to have some sort of freedom, but with the control of me having to say yes to everything that goes on a menu,” he says, noting that everything on his menus goes by him first. It’s a remarkably unapologetic acknowledgment. “Because no matter which way you slay it, no one’s ever going to care about the brands as much as I do, and they’re never going to see it the way that I see it,” 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 at Lower Slaughters Manor House in the Cotswolds. His next job was at the 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 back in Scotland, which he needed to make the move. 

“I had been away for such a long time that nobody knew who I was,” he recalls. “I felt a little bit pissed off about that, like no one in my home country had any clue about my career or things I’d done. I needed to prove to myself that I could come home and reestablish myself. But actually, now looking back, that was the best thing, because it made me work a lot harder to make sure that 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 dedicated most of his time and energy. The food was good, but it wasn’t the same as it was in its heyday. And being inside the Kimpton hotel was a challenge. 

“Everything was saying to me, ‘Yeah, it’s time to call it,’” Ralston says. “I always said if it ever 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 really that good,’ I would move on. So I made the heavy decision to kill it off. The reason we opened Vinette and Vivian is because I didn’t want to lose all those staff who had worked for me.”

It was a hard 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 have the burden of something. A lot of people really loved that restaurant. The amount of people who have come to me and told me about significant times in their lives that have been spent in that restaurant is amazing. So it was like: Everyone’s 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’s the only restaurant where he regularly cooks in the kitchen. He’s constantly inspired by the seasonality of produce in Scotland and the U.K., and changes dishes frequently, sometimes because there’s a new ingredient available, like rhubarb or asparagus, and sometimes because he’s bored. “It has to feel like, ‘This is better than we’re currently doing and it’s a step up’ 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 of the things he thinks about “with food and professional creativity.” The dishes are artful and complex, and the service is impeccably precise. Everything in the dining room and in the kitchen is carefully considered—an approach that extends to the bedrooms upstairs, as well. 

“I put a lot of work into how things look and how they feel and how you eat them and how that transcribes to a dining experience across the menu,” the chef says. “Not everybody will see how complicated things are—there’s a lot of work in certain things that look really simple. Each time we do something, it’s about the combination of the dish, the color, the texture, the flavor, what thing it’s going to be served on, what plate suits it the best, at what point in the meal it is served. That’s where you get something that becomes very personal and very unique that no one can really replicate. Because there’s not a system to it. It’s a feeling.”

Dining and sleeping at Lyla reflect that unique feeling that Ralston wants to convey. The rooms are homey and comfortable, but also stylish and elegant—the sort of place where you flip over lamps to see if you can buy one for yourself. The tasting menu, which is priced at £185 for dinner, £79 for a five-course lunch and £105 for a seven-course lunch, feels like a journey. Everything evokes something, even if you’re not quite sure what it is. The chawanmushi—a Japanese custard—was served with fresh spring peas and ham. It was the best thing I’ve eaten this year and completely singular. It brought with it the hope of spring, but also a sense of a far-flung place. 

“The dishes need to have a personality,” Ralston says. “They can’t be filler. And everything has to be delicious—that’s the most important thing. In my restaurants, there’s not a dish on the menus across the group that I don’t enjoy eating, from a salad to a soup to a pasta. These are the flavors and the foods that I like. That’s why we never put turnips on the menus, because I hate turnips. We’ve never served turnips, and we never will. Everything we do has to be worthwhile, or we shouldn’t do it.” 

Ralston’s controlled, thoughtful approach always comes through, whether it’s in specific dishes or in Lyla’s bedrooms—evidence that a singular vision can have impressive results.