Stuart Ralston’s Michelin-Starred Lyla Adds Rooms in Edinburgh

Stuart Ralston never thought he would become a hotelier. In fact, the Scottish chef had no firm plans for his career, other than owning his own restaurant one day. “Everything else came about by chance or grew the way it was,” Ralston told the Observer, speaking at his Michelin-starred restaurant, Lylain Edinburgh in late March. “When I first became 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 restaurants in 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 bedroom flat, located above Lyla in a historic town house near Edinburgh city centre, was previously run by someone else. Ralston had the opportunity to take them on last year and enlisted design firm Scarnish Studio to renovate the rooms and bring them into line with Lyla’s modern decor.

Scarnish Studio originally designed Lyla’s dining room, as well as Ralston’s Vinette and Vivian restaurants. “I wanted the rooms to feel classy, ​​like a restaurant, and I wanted them to feel individually designed, so they’re not the same,” said Ralston, 42. “I don’t like the idea of ​​having a cookie-cutter approach. Each one has unique features, so it makes sense to work with those features.”

Ralston drew on his travel experience to ensure that each room felt comfortable and well-appointed. “I saw a lot of hotels,” he says. “I wanted something where you felt like home, and you had the things you needed.” Music, homemade cocktails—those kinds 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,” explains Ralston. “So having something that really relates to the restaurant and what we do in the restaurant felt important. It’s a good thing to put in there, too, to keep it feeling classy and beautiful. There’s a lot of places where you get complete garbage.”

In the morning, the included breakfast is delivered to the room in a chic picnic basket. At first, Ralston thought of serving it in a downstairs restaurant, but the space seemed too big for a few of the hotel’s guests. He got inspiration from his hometown of Lummi Island, where they offered takeout instead of a cooked breakfast.

“It’s so nice to have breakfast in bed,” he says. Also, he eats a lot of food at Lyla. So in the morning, I don’t think you want a big breakfast. You want something unique and special.”

Opening hotel rooms is a calculated risk for Ralston, although in the turbulent hospitality industry, he thinks he might be a safe bet. “Rooms are not economically viable,” he notes, pointing to Edinburgh’s popularity with tourists. “Edinburgh is a tourist city, so there’s always a demand for hotel rooms. Running a high-end restaurant like Lyla is very expensive, so profit margins don’t matter. We might as well use everything we have in the building.”

Lyla’s rooms, from £295 per night, operate separately from the restaurant. While most guests will book into the 10-course tasting menu, Ralston knows some will come just for the hotel. The dining experience at Lyla is long—my dinner lasted more than three hours—so it’s a bonus to be able to crawl upstairs when you’re done. “There are no expectations for visitors,” said Ralston. “As long as the rooms and dining area are filled independently, it’s fine.”

Ralston’s clear view of Lyla stands well. The restaurant, which received a Michelin star in 2025, emphasizes local seafood, occasionally drawing international influences, such as Japanese cuisine. Although Ralston is from Scotland and has established himself as one of Edinburgh’s top chefs, he does not consider the food itself to be Scottish. “My food is a reflection of the places I’ve lived and worked in,” he says, noting that the years he spent in New York City working at the now-closed Gordon Ramsay in London had a big influence on him. “We mainly use Scottish produce in the restaurants, but with influences and methods from around the world.”

It was Ramsay who taught Ralston, who moved to New York at the age of 22, how to express a certain culinary vision. “Gordon had a distinct style of food with a French link throughout the menu,” he recalls. “We would never put anything wrong there, either. You wouldn’t have wasabi on the menu, for example. But then again, I think living in New York probably did a lot for me, too. There were a lot of different styles, like, ‘This is a Cuban restaurant, and that’s what they do.’ The players are cheeseburgers. They make Cuban food.”

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

“It’s about letting the chefs have some freedom, but with my control I have to agree to everything that happens,” he says, noting that everything on his menu goes to him first. It is a remarkably undeniable admission. “Because no matter how you kill it, no one will ever care about it like I do, and they won’t see it the way I see it,” he adds.

Ralston has become a mainstay in Edinburgh, but he hasn’t always been there. He grew up in Glenrothes, and spent his early years as a chef working in 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 settle in Edinburgh. It was more financially secure than New York or London. But Ralston had trouble finding work back in Scotland, which was necessary for him to travel.

“I had been gone for so long that no one knew who I was,” he recalls. “I felt angry about that, like nobody in my country knew about my work or the things I had done. I needed to prove that I could come home and settle down again. But actually, now, looking back, that was the best thing, because it made me work very hard to make sure that I was really successful in what I was doing.”

After 11 years in two different locations, Ralston decided to close Aizle in the fall of 2025. It had never been the same since he opened Lyla, where he devoted so much of his time and energy. The food was good, but it wasn’t what it used to be. And being inside a Kimpton hotel was a challenge.

“Everything said to me, ‘Yeah, it’s time to call it,'” Ralston said. I always said if it ever felt like it was becoming one of those restaurants where people were like, ‘It used to be really good, but now it’s not so good,’ I would go on. So I made the difficult decision to get rid of it. The reason we opened Vinette and Vivian is because I didn’t want to lose all those employees who worked for me.”

It was a difficult decision, but one that also came with some relief. Ralston says: “It turned me off for a lot of reasons—some professional, some personal. “Not having the responsibility of something. Many people really liked that restaurant. The number of people who have come up to me and told me about important moments in their lives spent in that restaurant is amazing. So it was like: Everyone liked it. It was a good run. Now we can put it to bed.”

Ralston now has four restaurants and a bar, but he’s focused on Lyla. It is the only restaurant where he always cooks in the kitchen. He is always inspired by the produce season in Scotland and the UK, and changes dishes regularly, 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 doing now and it’s a step up’ for us to change things,” he notes. “The langoustine dish has not changed because people love it so much and I don’t get sick of it either.

To Ralston, Lyla represents all the things he thinks about “food and art.” The dishes are creative and sophisticated, and the service is incredibly precise. Everything in the dining room and kitchen is carefully thought out—way through to the upper bedrooms, too.

“I put a lot of work into how things look and feel and how you eat them and how that fits in the restaurant throughout the menu,” said the chef. “Not everyone will see how complicated things are – there is a lot of work in some things that look really simple. Each time we do something, it’s about the combination of the dish, the color, the texture, the taste, which thing will be served with it, which plate suits it best, at what time of the meal it is served. That’s where you get something that is not personal and that no one can replicate. It’s a feeling.”

Eating and sleeping at Lyla reflects that unique feeling that Ralston wants to convey. The rooms are cozy and comfortable, but also stylish and elegant—the kind of place you flip on the lights to see if you can buy one for yourself. The tasting menu, priced at £185 for dinner, £79 for a five-course lunch and £105 for a seven-course lunch, feels like an adventure. Everything evokes something, even if you’re not sure what it is. Chawanmushi—Japanese custard—was served with fresh spring peas and ham. It was the best thing I have eaten this year and it is absolutely singular. It brought the hope of spring, but also the feeling of a distant place.

“Dishes need to have personality,” said Ralston. “They can’t be filling. And everything should be delicious – that’s the most important thing. In my restaurants, there is no dish on the menus in the whole group that I don’t enjoy eating, from salad to soup to pasta. These are the flavors and foods that I love. That’s why we never put turnip on the menus, because I won’t serve everything. It has to be beneficial, or we shouldn’t do it.”

Ralston’s controlled, thoughtful approach always comes through, whether in certain dishes or in Lyla’s rooms—proof that a single idea can have dramatic results.