EXCLUSIVE
Chef Lorna McNee’s imminent arrival in Glasgow from Gleneagles is sure to have an electrifying effect on the city’s restaurant scene. The move, just as lockdown eases, is as timely as it’s thrilling.
Lorna, 33, has spent almost her entire career in Scotland’s only two Michelin star kitchen. She joined Restaurant Andrew Fairlie at the Gleneagles Hotel as an apprentice in October 2008, after asking him for a job, and under the late chef’s watchful eye gradually moved from the Larder section to chef de partie and then to sous-chef. Encouraged and supported by chef Andrew, who died in 2019, and by head chef Stevie McLaughlin, she entered prestigious competitions (I first met her in 2016 when she won Game Chef of the Year) and she was named Scottish Chef of the Year in 2017. She won the Great British Menu competition in 2019.
Now, after almost 12 years, she’s set to take over the kitchen of one of the city’s independent fine-dining restaurants as head chef – and has been given free reign to recruit her own brigade.
Lorna hasn’t publicly said where she is going (though I gather it’s an open secret in cheffy circles). The jungle drums are beating. Glasgow, as everyone knows, doesn’t have a Michelin star. It hasn’t had one since 2003, when Gordon Ramsay closed his Amaryllis restaurant at One Devonshire Gardens (though I love the synchronicity that its star was a continuation of the first star Lorna’s late mentor Andrew Fairlie attracted for the restaurant in 1996 when it was owned by Glasgow hotelier Ken McCulloch. Also that she did a two-week stage with Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s while still a student at Moray College in Elgin).
Will Lorna turn the tide and get the city its first Michelin star for 17 years?
“I’m not going to say I’m aiming for a star, though it would be amazing for Glasgow to get one,” she says when we distance-meet in Glasgow on the condition that I won’t reveal the restaurant’s name (the owners want to make their own fanfare nearer the August opening, and I’m happy to play ball: securing Lorna is a major coup for them). “It’s not about that for me. A lot of what I’ll do is what I’ve taken from chef Andrew: good local ingredients cooked simply and well. Whatever comes after that is a bonus.”
A more pragmatic reason for making her move - after much soul-searching - is that she becomes head chef for the first time. “It's been a really hard decision to leave Stevie, Russell and the team, but for the benefit of their kitchen and for my career it’s the right thing to do,” she says. “I want to take the first step as head chef. If I’d stayed put I’d never have got there. Also, it’s nice to give other young chefs the opportunity to grow. I felt that if I didn’t make room for them they’d be denied the chance to move up too.
“I’m taking on a new learning curve. Learning how to bring people in and manage them, and finding my cooking style. Chef Stevie has said he thinks I have got a style. I want to see what that is.” Can she describe it? “I can’t see it yet.”
So I ask head chef Stevie, with whom she has worked since the beginning. “Lorna works with her fingertips and on the balls of her feet,” he says. “She is a talented chef and she does everything with great strength, physically and mentally. She has huge creative passion. What goes on the plate is flavour-driven and done with real finesse and elegance. [continues …]
Lorna McNee with her late mentor Andrew Fairlie, above; and with Stevie McLaughlin, right.
On her move to Glasgow, he adds: “It is the right time for Lorna to do her own thing, to seek her fortune elsewhere and to learn the ropes of running of a business rather than a section. There will be things in her that haven’t come out yet. This move gives her the freedom to create her own dishes, and I hope in Glasgow she finds other creative people to influence her.
“The expectation of what she’ll bring to Glasgow is huge because of where she comes from. What needs to be made clear is that Andrew would be incredibly proud of her moving on like this. I know that all she wants is for chef Andrew to be proud of her.
“For my part, I’ll be her best pal forever. I’m very pleased to be able to use her as a shining example to my own young chefs at Restaurant Andrew Fairlie.”
Lorna has now left Restaurant Andrew Fairlie. She’s started recruiting her new brigade for Glasgow, and I ask if she’s headhunted anyone from other restaurants.
“I’m not a poacher,” she says. “There are people at other Michelin starred places who want to come and work with me, but I’m friends with their head chefs so I wouldn’t do that. “If it happens that they become free later on, that’s fine.
“But right now I’m looking to where I came from: straight from college, all shiny and new. I got to become an apprentice with Andrew Fairlie just after finishing college, and there’s no reason not to take someone fresh out of college. They can become great chefs under the right direction. I want to show them how happy this job can make you.
“I want to be a mentor, a leader – not a dictator. I want to do for young chefs what chef Andrew did for me, while supporting Glasgow’s and Scotland’s food culture at the same time.”
I ask what she learned from over a decade at the famous Gleneagles restaurant. She doesn’t hesitate.
“Discipline. It’s massive. How to present yourself. Polished shoes. Washed and ironed jacket. Fresh apron. So when you cook you’ll always be clean.
“Always work in the same manner. Work left to right, no mess, always tidy. If you look messy you’ll work messy and your food will be messy.
“That was instilled in me and it will never leave me.”
So, be prepared then, anybody who works with her? “I’ll be instilling that in my team,” she says with a grin, adding: “The other thing I learned is now to be humble. There’s always something new to learn, always someone to help. It’s important to understand there’s always someone better coming up behind you. Just be nice to people. Treat them the way you’d like to be treated.”
So no place for shouting in her kitchen? “Eh, no.” Silence (apart, perhaps, from the sound of digital timers going off) was one of the stand-out features of chef Andrew’s kitchen too.
While all this is ongoing, she is also preparing for her September wedding to her long-term partner Dawn McIntyre, who also works at Gleneagles. They will remain in Auchterarder, with Lorna commuting to Glasgow.
She isn’t looking to build an all-female kitchen, and refutes the notion of feminine food.
“I don’t think there’s such a thing. Food isn’t feminine because of the way it looks. I think it’s about a lightness of touch that isn’t necessarily a woman’s. Chef Andrew had an amazing way of moving his hands that was light and elegant. You’d plate something and he’d come over and move a few things and instantly make it more elegant.”
Neither will she engage in the debate about women chefs being different from male. “I hate the whole female-male chef thing. We’re there to do a job – to be a chef. Whether you’re a boy or a girl will make no difference in my eyes.”
That said, the living chef she most admires is Clare Smythe. “She’s phenomenal. I went to eat at hers [Core restaurant in London’s Kensington] with chef Stevie and it was like being in an operating theatre. You walk past the open kitchen to get to your table and it was so quiet and clean. Her food is so flavoursome. Every element of a dish punches flavour and all the flavours are defined. Nothing in there muddles with the flavours that are meant to be. Straight away I thought, ‘I’d like to be like you one day’.”
Observing that diners are eating lighter and healthier now than when she started out, she says her tasting and a la carte menus will reflect that, with vegetable and plant-based dishes alongside meat and fish. One of her new dishes in development is an onion consommé with braised onion shell stuffed with Jerusalem artichoke, morels, girolles and chive oil. Further hints of what’s to come lie in Josh Niland’s The Whole Fish Cookbook, the first cookbook she has purchased in years; she also treasures John Campbell’s Formulas for Flavour, given to her as a birthday gift by chef Stevie in 2015.
She’s got plans for how her new Pass will look. “I’m ditching the metal cutlery jugs for bespoke pottery ones, and will show off the pots and pans a bit more. There may be food photography on the walls. It will look pretty.”
A small and subtle nod to femininity; potentially a giant leap for Glasgow gastronomy.
©️CateDevine
[Main image: I took this photograph of Lorna in Glasgow last week after her meeting with the owners of her new restaurant. I tried to make the location as neutral as possible, since the name of the restaurant is meant to be a secret until the official announcement!]