Stuart Ralston never imagined he would become a hotelier. In fact, the Scottish chef had no concrete plans for his career, other than one day owning his own restaurant. “Everything else came by chance or grew organically into what it is now,” Ralston tells the Observer, speaking from his Michelin-starred restaurant. LaylaIn Edinburgh in late March. “When I started working as a chef, I didn’t know anything.”
Ralston opened his first restaurant, Aizle, in Edinburgh in 2014. Since then, he has launched a series of restaurants across 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 above Layla are located in a historic townhouse near Edinburgh city centre, which was previously managed by someone else. Ralston had the opportunity to take it over last year, then hired design firm Scarnish Studio to renovate the rooms and bring them in line with Lyla’s contemporary, chic decor.
Scarnish Studio initially designed Lyla’s dining room, as well as the Vinette and Vivian restaurants in Ralston. “I wanted the rooms to feel upscale like a restaurant, and I wanted them to feel individually designed, so that they weren’t all the same,” says Ralston, 42. “I don’t like the idea of there being a cake-cutting process. They each have different features, so it makes sense to work around those features.”
Ralston relied on his own travel experiences to make sure each room felt comfortable and well-appointed. “I’ve seen a lot of hotels,” he says. “I wanted something that felt a little bit like home, and where you have the things you need. Music, homemade cocktails — that kind of thing.” The minibar also includes Kaviari caviar for £50 and a bottle of Krug Grand Cuvee MV for £350.
“I work a lot with caviar,” Ralston explains. “So, having something that really relates to the restaurant and what we do in the restaurant was important. It’s a weird thing to put in there as well, to keep it feeling classy and elegant. There’s a lot of places where you get absolute garbage.”
In the morning, breakfast is delivered to the room in a stylish picnic basket. Originally, Ralston considered serving it in the restaurant downstairs, but the space seemed too large for the few hotel guests. He took inspiration from a place he stayed on Lomé Island, where they served a variety of items instead of a cooked breakfast.
“It’s nice to eat breakfast in bed,” he says. “I can give you all the things I think you’ll enjoy in the morning and make it an extension of the quality of the restaurant. You also eat a lot of food at Layla’s. So in the morning, I don’t think you’re looking for a big breakfast. You want something a little more eclectic and eclectic.”
Opening hotel rooms is a calculated risk for Ralston, though he believes it could be a sure bet in the turbulent hospitality sector. “The rooms are economically bulletproof,” he points out, noting 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 Laila’s is very expensive, so profit margins are almost non-existent. We might as well make use of everything we have in the building.”
Layla’s rooms, which start at £295 per night, operate separately from the restaurant. Although many guests will likely book the 10-course tasting menu, Ralston knows others will come just to the hotel. The dining experience at Lyla’s is long, as I ate dinner for over three hours, so it helps that I can crawl upstairs once I’m done. “There are no expectations for guests,” says Ralston. “As long as the rooms and restaurant are filled independently, it’s okay.”
Ralston’s clear vision of Laila is well established. The fine dining restaurant, which was awarded a Michelin star in 2025, focuses on local seafood, sometimes drawing on global influences, such as Japanese techniques. Although Ralston is from Scotland and has established himself as one of Edinburgh’s best chefs, he doesn’t consider the food itself Scottish. “My food is a reflection of the places I’ve lived and worked,” he says, noting that the years he spent in New York City while working at Gordon Ramsay’s now-closed Hotel in London had a major influence on him. “We mainly use Scottish produce in the restaurants, but with influences and techniques from all over the world.”
It was Ramsay who taught Ralston, who moved to New York at age 22, how to channel a specific culinary vision. “Gordon had a very clear food style with a French connection throughout the menu,” he recalls. “We weren’t putting anything weird in there either. You wouldn’t have wasabi on the menu, for example. But also, I think living in New York probably did a lot for me as well. There were a lot of different approaches, like, ‘This is a Cuban restaurant, this is what they do.’ They’re not messing with cheeseburgers. They’re making Cuban food.”
The chef applies this idea to all his restaurants. Each has a specific identity. Noto is his version of a Japanese tavern, Teebo serves noodles, and Lila serves up fine dining. Ralston makes sure that every person he employs at every restaurant serves that specific vision. But he also spends a lot of time in each restaurant, which helps channel his inspiration to the chefs. Currently, his only day off is Sunday.
“It’s about letting the chefs have some kind of freedom, but having the control that I have to say yes to everything on the menu,” he says, noting that everything on his menus goes through him first. It’s a remarkably unapologetic admission. “Because no matter which way you go about it, no one will ever care about brands as much as I do, and they will never look at it the way I do,” he adds.
Ralston became a mainstay in Edinburgh, but he did not always live there. He grew up in Glenrothes, and spent his early years as a chef working all over Scotland. After seven years in New York, he moved to England to work in… 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 more financially secure than New York or London. But Ralston had difficulty finding a job in Scotland, which was what he needed to make the move.
“I was away for a long time and no one knew who I was,” he recalls. “I felt a little angry about it, as no one back home had any idea about my career or the things I did. I needed to prove to myself that I could go home and re-establish myself. But actually, now, looking back, it was the best thing, because it made me work harder to make sure I was really good at what I was doing.”
After 11 years in two different locations, Ralston has decided to close Aizle in the fall of 2025. Nothing has been the same since he opened Lyla’s, where he has devoted most of his time and energy. The food was good, but not what it was in its heyday. Being inside the Kimpton Hotel was a challenge.
“Everything was telling me, ‘Yes, it’s time to call him,'” Ralston says. “I always said that if I ever felt like it became one of those restaurants where people say, ‘Well, it used to be really good, but now it’s not really good,’ then I would move on. So I made the tough decision to stop 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 it also came with some relief. “It gave me closure for a lot of reasons, some professional and some personal,” Ralston says. “So we’re not burdened with something. A lot of people really loved this restaurant. The amount of people who came up to me and told me about important times in their lives that they had at this restaurant is amazing. So it was like: Everyone loved it. It was a good trip. Now we can be done with it.”
Ralston now has four restaurants and a bar, but his focus is on Leila. It’s the only restaurant where he regularly cooks in the kitchen. He is constantly inspired by the seasonality of produce in Scotland and the UK, and changes dishes frequently, sometimes because a new ingredient becomes available, such as rhubarb or asparagus, and sometimes because he is bored. “We should feel that this is better than what we are currently doing, and it is a step forward for us to change things,” he points out. “The langoustine dish has not changed because people love it so much and I never get bored of it either. I love it.”
For Ralston, Lila represents all the things he thinks about “food and professional creativity.” The dishes are skillful and complex, and the service is meticulous. Everything in the dining room and kitchen has been carefully considered – an approach that extends to the upstairs bedrooms as well.
“I put a lot of work into how things look, how they feel, how you eat them, and how that is reflected in the dining experience across the menu,” says the chef. “Not everyone will see how complicated things are – there’s a lot of work in certain things that seem really simple. Every time we do something, it’s about the combination of the dish, the colour, the texture, the flavour, what it’s going to be served on, which dish it goes best with, at what point in the meal it’s served. And that’s where you get something that becomes very personal and very unique that no one can really replicate. Because there’s no system to it. It’s the feeling.”
Eating and sleeping at Lyla reflects this unique feeling that Ralston wants to convey. The rooms are homey and cozy, but also elegant and elegant – the kind of place where you flip on lamps 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, sounds like a trip. Everything triggers something, even if you’re not quite sure what it is. Chawanmushi – a Japanese custard – was served with fresh spring peas and pork. It was the best thing I’ve eaten this year and was completely unique. It brought with it the hope of spring, but also a sense of far away place.
“Dishes should have character,” says Ralston. “It can’t be filler. And everything has to be delicious – that’s the most important thing. In my restaurants, there isn’t a dish on the set menus 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 kale on menus, because I hate kale. We’ve never served kale, and we never will. Everything we do has to be worthwhile, or we shouldn’t do it.”
Whether it’s on specific dishes or in Lily’s bedrooms, Ralston’s considered, controlled style always comes through—proof that individual vision can have dazzling results.
