Tom Kitchin doesn't even try to pretend. There are lots of reasons why he's delighted his eponymous restaurant, in Leith, down by Edinburgh's docks, has been named restaurant of the year by you, the readers. He's pleased that it's his customers who have voted for him and his team, rather than some shabby crew of critics; he's delighted that it justifies four years of very hard work; thrilled for what it says about his conviction that top flight, big-fisted food doesn't have to be served in uptight, prissy, overly formal surroundings.
But it's the fact that he's got one over on the polished and preening gastro-palaces in London that's really making him smile. "I have had to fight a constant battle to get my hands on the ingredients I need," he tells me, "because they all go to London. We have some of the best ingredients in the world here in Scotland but the challenge is to stop them heading south." He tells me about a supplier of perfect lobsters, who refused to let him have any even though they were being landed only a few minutes from the door of his restaurant. He needed them for his classy take on thermidor. "Eventually I had to tell him to come and eat here as my guest to see exactly what it is we were trying to do."
A few courses later, and Kitchin had made his point. He had his lobsters. "In London they've had a day's travel before you eat them. Here they couldn't be any fresher." He's not joking. Each lobster is shown to the diner who ordered it, while it's still alive, claws twitching, and only then dispatched to order. "It has put a few people off but, well, that can't be helped." It's the way Tom Kitchin likes to do things, and there are more than enough people out there who do appreciate his gutsy style.
The Kitchin was launched on a shoestring in 2006, with money begged from the bank, and the support of family and friends. Worryingly, the site they found, in a dockside development dominated by chain restaurants, had proved a graveyard for four or five catering ventures, but they pushed on regardless. It is an uncompromisingly modernist space of hard lines and man-made materials, softened by carefully chosen shades of grey, and the cheerful engagement of the waiters.
Tom and his Swedish wife Michaela had to do much of the decorating themselves. There were only three people in the kitchen back then, and the crockery and cookware was secondhand, mostly from Pierre Koffmann's famed London restaurant La Tante Claire, where Kitchin had learned a lot of his craft. What was never in doubt, however, was Kitchin's pedigree. He had sweated his time out as the lowest of the low and worked in some of the world's very best kitchens, turning vegetables for the likes of Alain Ducasse and Guy Savoy, sleeping on floors in Paris because the salary didn't allow for a room of his own. "But the ambition was always to come back to where I was from and open a restaurant," he says. "We always felt there was something we could do here."
Tom Kitchin, now 33, is solid and stocky, with a round open face and a cascade of curly hair. While he has a surname made for the food business, he admits his story is a little light on romance. He didn't get his taste for cooking at his mother's side, though he says she's a good cook. It was more prosaic than that. As a 13-year-old he got a job as a pot washer at a pub near where he grew up just outside Edinburgh, and discovered a world of which he wanted to be a part. "It was a good pub, which served a lot of game in season so we had all the birds coming in, but it was still a pub." Nevertheless his enthusiasm was spotted and he was dispatched for a try out at the nearby Gleneagles Hotel, which had a huge, old-style classic hotel brigade of 80 chefs. Soon he was taken on and, after a year at catering college – a kind of training he's not convinced by; he'd always rather do than watch – he went to London to work with Pierre Koffmann for the first time.
Kitchin is clear that Koffmann, who has just opened a restaurant of his own once again, was and remains the biggest influence on his professional life, and his style of food. "He's still my mentor," Kitchin says. "We still talk two or three times a week. He has this ability to extract maximum flavour from ingredients which is an inspiration. It's about making ingredients work for you. He showed me how to get a wild salmon and use not just the fillets, but everything else for ravioli for the cheaper day menu. When I serve langoustine I don't just use the tails, but the claw meat too, because nothing should be wasted." From Koffmann, the man who serves brains and trotters and kidneys, he learned that the cuts others might discard can be where the flavour is. For Kitchin it's never about how it looks – though it usually looks great. It's all about taste.
Across a vibrant, thrilling lunch, served in a dining room buzzing with happy chatter, he makes the point time and again. There's a chilled pea soup, with a burst of wild mint and a soothing dollop of creme fraiche which is light and bright and fresh. There's a razor clam, sauteed with chorizo and curls of squid and the tiniest micro dice of vegetables then returned to the shell. I am introduced to my shiny, gunmetal grey lobster, pincers waving from a rough-hewn wooden dish. And then re-introduced to it on the half shell, glazed with a thermidor sauce, decorated with crisp, salty sprigs of samphire, all of which makes you want to lick the shell clean, to dig your tongue into every nook and cranny. Best of all there is a half cylinder of roasted beef bone, with its rich, savoury cargo of jellied marrow, dressed with snails, crisped pancetta, girolles, meaty jus and a brightly acidic parsley salad. "A real foodie's dish that one," says Kitchin afterwards.
And there is a grouse. The moment lunch service ends on 12 August, the official start of the grouse shooting season, Kitchin drives down to a contact in the Borders to pick up his first birds, and they're on the menu for that evening. He serves it in the classic style, with bread sauce and duck fat-fried game chips. "That's what a restaurant like this should be doing." It was that commitment, and his obsessive attention to detail, which won Kitchin a Michelin star within its first six months and later the title of Scottish restaurant of the year in a highly regarded set of industry awards.
But none of that has made him complacent. "If anything I'm even more obsessive now," he says. "The business has grown so fast and people's expectations are now so high that I have to be. I fear that if you take your foot off the pedal even for a moment, it will all fall apart." He admits some things have got much easier. He has a brigade of 10 now and they have new crockery all of their own. (Though he has retained some of the Tante Claire cookware. "I like to tell my cooks that Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White touched those dishes when they cooked with them so they should be treated with respect. I like that sense of history.")
On the day we meet, Michaela, who runs much of the financial side of the business with the support of Tom's father Ron, was eight months pregnant with their second child. "I am hoping that he takes a little time off for the birth," she says. "But I'm happy for him to be in the kitchen because that's where he's happiest." Occasionally Tom turns up on television, as a contestant on Great British Menu or a judge on Masterchef. "My rule is that I'll do it, be away from my restaurant, if it benefits the business." Otherwise, he wants to be here, by the Water of Leith, cooking his brand of food, extracting maximum flavour from his ingredients, pushing himself forward to produce dishes that will make his customers purr. And given that you have voted for The Kitchin, named it our restaurant of the year, all his effort has clearly paid off.
The Kitchin, 78 Commercial Quay, Leith, Edinburgh; 0131 555 1755; thekitchin.com
