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Wine List of the Week: Lyla

20 July 2026 By Douglas Blyde

At Edinburgh’s Lyla, chef Stuart Ralston and sommelier Stuart Skea have created a restaurant where seafood, acidity and exceptional wines meet in a dining experience of rare precision. Douglas Blyde finds out more.

At No. 3 Royal Terrace, a raised stone still projects from the pavement – a survivor from when horse-drawn carriages drew up outside Edinburgh’s grand houses. Two centuries on, Stuart Ralston’s Porsche 911 waits on the cobbles, a flash of Stuttgart against honeyed stone. The address already carried gastronomic weight. Before Lyla, it housed 21212, the £4.5m venture of the late Paul Kitching and Katie O’Brien, which became one of Edinburgh’s most singular restaurants. When I interviewed Kitching in 2014, he reckoned the city had enough restaurants “to provide food for your mood”. His own cooking was perhaps “the least Scottish food” imaginable. Another line stayed with me: “I go to bed a King and wake up as meek as a mouse.”

Ralston now writes the next chapter. After working for Daniel Humm in Chicago and Jean-Georges Vongerichten in New York, he returned to Edinburgh to establish Aizle, followed by Noto, Tipo and Lyla, before adding Parisian bar à vin, Vinette and its subterranean cocktail bar, Vivien. His older brother Scott, Group Chef, oversees Noto, Tipo, Vinette and Vivien; younger brother Calumn heads the kitchens at the latter two, leaving Stuart focused on Lyla.

Only four bedrooms sit above the 28-cover seafood restaurant, and the evening begins before one reaches the table. In ours, pork and haggis sausage rolls with fig and apple mostarda disappeared with indecent speed, while optional in-room temptations included full-sized bottles of Krug, Kaviari caviar with crisps and Craigellachie 20-year-old cask-strength whisky.

Scarinish Studio – also behind Vinette, Lady Libertine and the Hendrick’s Gin Palace – reworked interiors without effacing the building’s past. Cornices, sweeping stairs and sash windows remain; the dining room and garden-facing open pass feel spare rather than starved. Michelin praised sustainably sourced seafood and nuanced cooking; Ailsa Sheldon in The National was more economical: “The halibut makes my partner go misty-eyed.”

Lyla is unusually explicit about its limits: it cannot cater for vegetarian or vegan diners, nor provide an entirely fish-, shellfish-, egg- or dairy-free meal. In an age of near-limitless adaptation, such candour is bracing.

That seriousness extends to employment. Lyla is among the first restaurants to earn VERiFAIR accreditation, the independently verified standard founded by Justine Murphy after 28 years in hospitality, which tests how workplace policies are applied.

Drinks

The other Stuart deserves equal billing. Group Head Sommelier Stuart Skea’s return to No. 3 Royal Terrace has the shape of a well-poured plot twist. He first became head sommelier here in 2012 under Kitching; fourteen years later, he gives Ralston’s cooking its liquid counterpart.

Skea described Lyla’s list as “classical, Eurocentric, with a modern twist”. It opens with a page devoted solely to Krug – Grande Cuvée 171ème, 169ème and 166ème, Rosé 26ème and the 2006 vintage – before prestige gives way to growers: Pierre Péters, Benoît Déhu, Agrapart, Suenen, Laherte Frères, Jacques Lassaigne, Vouette & Sorbée and Bérêche. England appears through Roebuck and Danbury Ridge.

Skea’s personality announces itself before a cork is drawn. Rosés are printed in pink; orange wines in orange. It is almost childishly obvious, and oddly charming. Spain receives particular attention. Ad Libitum’s Maturana Blanca and Abel Mendoza take Rioja beyond Tempranillo, while Bierzo, Galicia, Tenerife, Alicante and Catalunya are explored with curiosity. South Africa is well served by Badenhorst, Sadie Family, Mullineux, Restless River, Sijnn and Iona; Jura by Tissot and Labet. Even the by-the-glass selection extends to sake. None of this feels fashionable; it feels considered.

Readers may remember Skea confessing, in my “Unfiltered” interview with him, to an aversion to mousy natural wine, coffee Pinotage, over-extracted reds and English Bacchus, which he judged “more unpleasant and cat-pissy than Kiwi Sauvignon”. It is hard not to warm to a sommelier who still leaves room for such helpful violence.

At the Coravin Paulée I hosted with Greg Lambrecht in Edinburgh, Skea was the only sommelier to bring a screw-capped wine: Helm Premium Riesling 2018 from Canberra. A small act of heresy – and entirely consistent with a sommelier who values what is in the glass over the fuss around it.

Having worked in pubs, bowling clubs, seedy Glasgow nightclubs, venues where chefs “smoked crack”, Oddbins and Michelin-starred restaurants, he understands hospitality from the floorboards up. That breadth of experience may explain why Lyla’s cellar feels neither boastful nor bashful: grand where it should be, mischievous where it can be and, above all, coherent.

Dishes

Born into a family of chefs, Ralston describes himself as having “a very high-acid palate”. It is the remark which unlocks Lyla. Richness is continually checked by citrus, fermentation and vinegar, while Japanese ingredients – koji, mirin, dashi, sake, katsuobushi and yuzu – deepen flavour rather than dictate identity.

Ralston wants each course to arrive differently, avoiding repetition of ingredients, techniques or manner of service. A succession of chefs – some shy, others assured – therefore emerge from the open kitchen to carry, finish and explain dishes at table rather than remaining behind the pass.

The menu opens in the first-floor bar, whose windows look towards the Firth of Forth. An elegant canapé of Alpine cheese from Bavaria, onion, quince and sea buckthorn finds brightness in a house pour of Pierre Péters Blanc de Blancs before poached lobster arrives glossed with its own oil and roe, sake adding depth. Next comes golden sea beet with house-cured sea trout from Oban – glimpsed resting in the glass-fronted locker – sour cream, lemon gel and an outrageously generous spoonful of Kaviari Oscietra.

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Kingfish follows in the dining room, arranged like a flower in chilled broth with katsuobushi and almond. The soundtrack ranges from Stan Bush’s “Dare” to Björk’s “Human Behaviour”; one diner is in shorts, and nobody appears troubled. Skea pours DuMOL’s Sonoma Coast Chenin Blanc, patiently explaining the role of Austrian oak. What might have sounded like technical exposition instead becomes an invitation to notice texture.

Early in the meal he sets a decanter on the table. It breathes through the seafood courses. I guessed mature Bordeaux, then changed my mind to New World Cabernet.

The langoustine is magnificent. Creel-caught and almost lobster-sized, it arrives wrapped in crisp kataifi pastry, dusted with dehydrated scallop roe, beside burnt apple, sorrel and a bowl of rose water for rinsing fingers. Ralston’s riff on fish and chips finds its ideal companion in Krug Grande Cuvée 171ème Édition, whose breadth makes the shellfish taste sweeter still. Skea hopes Lyla will become a Krug Ambassade, where the house is woven through the dining experience rather than reserved for celebration alone.

A silken chawanmushi of seasonal pea, ham, yuzu, mint oil, courgette flower and caviar further demonstrates Ralston’s gift for complexity. Skea answers with Vignai da Duline Morus Alba 2014, a penetrating Friulian blend of old-vine Malvasia Istriana and an ancient Sauvignon clone. Outstanding laminated brioche follows with Lyla’s koji and wild garlic butter, sculpted like coral.

Perhaps the cleverest pairing arrives with squid cooked at 62°C in Isle of Wight tomato water, lemon verbena, mirin, Chardonnay vinegar and olive oil. Ralston describes it as his interpretation of ramen. Skea reaches not for sake but mature white Châteauneuf 2014 from Beaucastel, recognising texture as the bridge.

Then comes the evening’s defining course. Monkfish meets more caviar and an intensely distilled interpretation of Cullen skink, every mouthful moving between smoke, shellfish, cream and salinity before fading into delicate warmth. Skea answers with Yves Gangloff’s beautifully poised Condrieu. Lesser sommeliers might have chased power. Wine and food dissolve into one another until separating them feels almost impossible. It is the pairing of the evening.

Only then, with late light still filling the windows, does the decanter which has hidden in plain sight throughout the seafood courses disclose its identity: Ridge Monte Bello 1998. It accompanies a tranche of intensely marbled Kirishima Wagyu – described as coming from seaweed-fed cattle – beneath black truffle, with tartare and a crisp, almost KFC-style sweetbread alongside. Made under Paul Draper’s “pre-industrial” creed and carrying just 12.4% alcohol, the wine answers such richness with cedar, savoury fruit and filigreed delicacy.

Bone-dry 1964 Garrafeira Madeira, astonishingly vital, accompanies Coolea, walnut and leek. Harvested more than six decades ago, it makes time another ingredient in the glass.

Strawberry, cherry blossom and sorrel provide a graceful pause before a chocolate and hazelnut dessert crowned with earthy Jerusalem artichoke ice cream meets Donnafugata Ben Ryé from Pantelleria. Pol Roger Vintage 2016 concludes the evening alongside beautifully judged petits fours: malt Dulcey bon bon, kelp and white chocolate financier, an outstanding rum canelé perfumed with meadowsweet – Ralston cheerfully admits an obsession with specialist moulds – and transparent elderflower pâte de fruit.

Last Sip

In an interview with Andy Lynes for Smashed, Ralston said he wanted diners to leave understanding his personality. By the final mouthful, his is unmistakable: intellectually curious, technically assured and never louder than necessary.

Lyla’s greater achievement lies in the exchange between kitchen and cellar. Ralston cooks with uncommon finesse; Stuart Skea answers with equal intelligence, each course gaining from the other. Together, they have given Royal Terrace a compelling new identity without imitating the restaurant Kitching made.

A diner may arrive in shorts, but there is nothing casual about the achievement. Lyla already belongs among Britain’s finest restaurants and, on this evidence, a second Michelin star would feel less like promotion than recognition.

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