Long before Lyla was a twinkle in Stuart Ralston’s eye, the chef was solving the equation of a successful restaurant through three other Edinburgh ventures. Ralston says he’d never intended to open a fourth so soon but the opportunity was too special to miss when he was offered the iconic dining room of 21212, after Paul Kitching died suddenly in 2022.
Site secured and equation in hand, Lyla opened to critical acclaim in 2023. It’s built on confident foundations by a man who understands a £165 meal must offer something superlative.
Superlative it is; from the serene, gallery-like dining space made up of spot-lighting, marble panelled walls and crisply clothed tables through to the menu bursting with the UK’s finest produce.
The night begins upstairs, where canapes are being tweezered into life at the bar and run from scallop tarts through to dainty dried flower topped cheese and crackers. Every bite involves about 14 hard-to-pronounce ingredients but each offers pure, explosive joy. Everything here is about intense textures, with fish eggs bursting against gauze-thin shells that shatter in a second.
Downstairs in the dining room the courses keep coming - all ten of them - and are served by a wonderfully warm but uber professional team. The kind who keep your evening on track without you noticing the hundred little details they’re doing.
Ralston is seemingly a chef obsessed with detail. An opening course layers cured bream with tiny kohlrabi discs and caviar that exemplifies his cooking: considered, accomplished, clean-cut. Throughout the menu, which to relay in too much detail would ruin the delight of its twists and turns, there are touches of Japanese techniques (a set chawanmushi custard, say) that enliven British ingredients. Later on, and a few glasses of very good wine later, a piece of wagyu is the only meat course and takes you up and down on notes of sweet and sour of a walnut ketchup and fried, crispy sweetbreads.
The coming together of every little part of Lyla feels like the culmination of a lifetime’s work that offers guests something truly magical: the time and space to experience the restorative and transportative power of food made by a team that truly care about what they’re putting on the plate.