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Alex turned the radio off as he steered along the winding gravel road to Dunbar Graves’ restaurant. His Father’s old restaurant, the place where he grew up.

He parked at the gate and turned off the engine. Alex looked at the familiar old building, it was a granite and red sandstone 18^th century hunting lodge, twelve bedrooms, a library, lounge, smoking room, forty acres of moss carpeted woodland a small loch and of course, a two Michelin star kitchen and restaurant, still the best set up for five hundred miles.

He looked up at the windows and knew every room behind every curtain and door. His Grandfather bought the building then known as Sleat House after the war. It had been commandeered by the royal navy to house rehabilitating sailors in clean air, but by 1952, abandoned by the armed forces and soon there wasn’t a single slate on its roof or pane of glass left intact. His Grandfather had worked his whole life as a gamekeeper on the surrounding estate and witnessed what was becoming of the old building, so dutifully sank all his money into it. When Alex senior was fifteen his Father realised Sleat House needed a Chef and sent his only son to France to stay with one of the Loire valley’s great families, Les Charbonniers du Thone, a family who had visited the House many times before the war, but who had lost almost as much as the rest of France in the intervening years. Alex senior spent nine years under the wing of Monsieur Charbonnier and was packed off around France to learn from the best of the new young Chefs. He trained in Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and Marseilles. It was on the Mediterranean coast that he finally learned that the culinary arts France had built it’s reputation on, were based on ingredients that even the dimmest Islander would see as inferior to the seafood harvest found in the Island’s deep, jade-tinged seas. In a moment of clarity, he realised that if you stripped away the complexities of the old Haute Cuisine sauces and garnishes. You would find the finest Scottish produce; from pedigree Aberdeen Angus to wild Orkney salmon to Hebridean langoustines, the staple dishes in every major restaurant from Lyon to London had one supplier in common, Scotland.