FOOD & DRINK SUPPORTED BY
PALETTE CLEANSING As a new dining and exhibition development is set to open on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, David Kirkwood looks at the coming together of food and art
S ummer in Edinburgh means festivals, chaos and madness – where courtyards become theatres and campervans sell street food. The city’s focus is on all things art, especially the transient kind. But up on Calton Hill, a project with an exciting sense of permanency, and food and art at its core, is about to invite us in.
Part of the redeveloped City Observatory site, the Lookout is a restaurant with an impressive vista of the city, built on a cantilever and partially suspended over Calton Hill’s northwest slope. It’s a collaboration between contemporary arts organisation Collective and the team behind the Gardener’s Cottage. ‘We discovered the site back in 2010,’ explains Collective’s Eric Hilldrew. ‘We’ve always been an organisation that utilises temporary spaces, and for the Edinburgh Art Festival that year we were putting on an exhibition in an unused site on top of Calton Hill – we quickly realised that it was a place with incredible potential.’
Eight years sounds like development hell but, given the scale, it starts to make sense. Joining the Lookout will be the Hillside, a panoramic exhibition space built into the hill, and the City Dome, another space repurposing the former observatory. The building and design reigns are in the hands of Collective Architecture (no relation) whose work on Glasgow projects, including Empire Café and the redevelopment of the Southside’s old Victoria Ini rmary, demonstrate a sensitivity for breathing new life into already stunning structures. Then there’s the eating. ‘We’d always intended the restaurant to be a special feature,’ says Hilldrew, pointing out that they anticipate a far more varied clientele than in any of the smaller spaces they’ve inhabited. ‘We always wanted that side of things to be run by people who shared our values and goals’. Enter Dale Mailley and his team, who opened the Gardener’s Cottage in 2012 to immediate acclaim for dishes dei ned by a hands-on ethos, delicate execution and ultra-seasonality. Their reputation is well established, further fuelled by their second location, Quay Commons in Leith, which is not just an elegant café but also a full-on prep site. Behind the scenes there, they have a butcher and i ve bakers, who supply over 40 other venues
in the capital, and another section where much preserving, fermenting and pickling is done. While Mailley is still working on the specii cs of the menu at the Lookout, he does enthuse: ‘The workspace in Leith really allows us to draw on some common l avours – and produce – across all our restaurants. We want them all to have a shared identity, although the Lookout will have some nods to modernity that acknowledge the art space next door, in the same way that the Gardener’s Cottage always rel ects the traditional roots of that building’s previous use.’
Alongside the cafés at the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery of Modern Art (operated, among others, by Heritage Portfolio, who have raised the bar in the capital over the last decade for what we expect at our artsy eateries), the capital is well set this autumn for art-inspired dining.
Over in Glasgow, August saw the i rst Artist’s Spread dining event, a new initiative by local artist David McDiarmid – described on his website as ‘artist / curator / restaurant manager’. ‘So many artists also work in hospitality, and the idea is to combine those two areas into a new type of artist- run operation,’ he explains. The sold-out dinner, hosted by the Project Cafe and poignantly near the Art School i re site, involved various artists with front-of-house, kitchen or bar experience, who created a three-course menu together. The 50 diners also received art created by someone from the collective. This ranged from the performative (Robert Thomas James Mill’s ‘Presenting Drinks Disguised As A Self Service Machine’) to the practical (Emma Roger’s ceramic lemon juicers, which were used to l avour the aubergine scallops), with artist Stuart Noble’s resin-cast dung beetle inviting diners to forever remember the ice-cream and chocolate version they had just enjoyed: another example of how art, food, the passing and the permanent can go so delightfully well together.
thelookoutedinburgh.co
collectivegallery.net fb.com/artistsspread
48 THE LIST 1 Sep–31 Oct 2018