Across the globe, restaurants are scrambling to make sustainability claims to lure in 2024’s conscientious diners. Amid the rise of plant-based, nose-to-tail and zero-waste menus, perhaps one of the simplest ways to reduce food miles is by harking back to the days before refrigerated mass shipping and the vast global import/export trade. Implicit in embracing ancient cooking techniques from hundreds of years ago is the idea of turning back towards traditional dishes and ingredients from the land and sea around us, rather than relying on avocados and tomatoes from greenhouses and forests thousands of miles away.

This isn’t a new idea for some Scottish restaurants. On the Isle Of Skye, The Dunvegan offers a fire dining menu where local lobsters, scallops, mussels and venison are cooked over an open flame. In Argyll, Inver (Scotland’s first Michelin Green Star winner) pickles, bakes bannocks and has a zero-waste ethos that echoes the stocking-up for winter routinely practised before household refrigeration became widespread.

In Edinburgh, Chef Dan Ashmore plans to embrace ancient cooking at ASKR. Meaning ‘ash’ in Gaelic, ASKR will focus on the local larder and open-fire cooking, harnessing both the power of flickering flames and the slow-cooking potential of the overnight embers, just as folk did hundreds of years ago. ‘With ASKR, I wanted to create my dream restaurant,’ says Ashmore. ‘I hope to be quite “caveman” in my cooking method but refined in the plating of the dishes.’ 

The highlight of the menu will be hogget cooked over an open fire. ‘It doesn’t get much more ancient than fire cooking, does it?’ he continues. ‘I’ve been reading about old cooking methods; leaving food near the dying embers of the fire was a popular way to make sure there was food ready in the morning. We’re going to incorporate this into a beetroot dish for long, overnight cooking without being so wasteful as to keep an oven on all night.’ There’s also a preservation station in the kitchen, so fruit, vegetables and pulses can be stored and used long after they are in season.

Formerly head chef at The Pompadour, Ashmore’s dream restaurant will be supported by chef Dean Banks, no stranger to embracing traditional Scottish cooking methods at his own restaurants. Haar in St Andrews showcases local seafood from the Fife coast, sometimes caught and collected by Banks himself. A deconstructed Arbroath smokie dish nods to fish-smoking techniques that have been practised on the east coast for centuries.

At the very least, incorporating natural preservation and fire-cooking into the modern restaurant kitchen is a nice way to keep the old methods from dying out. While it’s not a sure-fire option to guarantee restaurant food miles stay low, turning to these traditional methods of cooking draws inspiration from, and focus to, the ingredients in the landscape around us. ‘After all,’ Ashmore says, ‘Scotland really does have the best larder in the world.’