By Dave Hunter
Tom and Matilda Tsappis could very easily have got in over their heads when they bought Killiecrankie House in Perthshire in 2020.
Not only was the building – which had operated as a hotel for the better part of a century – badly in need of some TLC, but the couple who had just bought it had never run a restaurant or a hotel before. They’d never even worked in a restaurant or a hotel before.
In fact, other than a brief spell operating a supper club in London, they’d never worked in any form of hospitality at all.
Tom, originally from London, and Matilda, who grew up in Fife, met while they were both living in Japan.
At the time, Tom was employed in finance and Matilda in advertising.
Both jobs exposed them to some top restaurants in Japan, and Tom began to develop an interest in cooking during his spare time.
“I just started doing it (cooking),” he told SLTN last month.
“The truth is that I like to eat. And one is a means to the other. I didn’t fall into cooking. I was working in finance. I had a pretty good job. On paper, I guess. I didn’t love it but it was fine.
“The food (in Japan) is great. And it’s Japanese. If you want to eat something you miss from home you’ve got no choice but to make it. Even if you go to an Italian restaurant you’re eating spaghetti with spicy mentaiko, which is like cod roe. It’s all hybridised.
“So if you want shepherd’s pie you’ve got no choice but to make it.
“So I started cooking in Japan, basically. I started cooking things that I missed.”
By the time the couple returned to the UK, Tom had fallen in love with cookery. Finance just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
With Matilda still working in advertising, Tom started a supper club in the couple’s London flat, charging £65 a head and with customers bringing their own wine. The table sat 12 people and they ate what Tom prepared for them. There was no menu.
And then the pandemic hit.
Having been trapped in their London flat, the couple were determined to make a move as soon as lockdown restrictions eased.
They got the keys for Killiecrankie House, just outside Killiecrankie and only a few miles from Pitlochry, in November 2020 and were promptly plunged into another lockdown.
When the world opened back up again the refurb began in earnest. And it was a big job.
“We kept the outside walls. Everything else is brand new,” said Tom.
“The building when we bought it had pretty much no heating. All the electrics had failed. They were running but they were old fuses and they would never have passed any fire safety test.
“All the plumbing, all the electrics, all the heating. We had to build a boiler room.
“The dining room and the kitchen used to be a bedroom. When we took the tiles up there was just mud underneath them. There was no foundation in that part of the building. So there was a lot of work.”
The project took ten months, with the new-look restaurant with rooms (there are five letting bedrooms) opening in October 2021. Tom heads the kitchen team with Matilda, whose father owns a vineyard in China and who had previously studied WSET exams as a hobby, running front of house.
The businesses’ first festive season, its owners admit, was ‘bleak’.
“We had no reputation. We were in the middle of nowhere,” said Tom.
“We now know that November, December are two of our worst months of the year. That was pretty tough, and we were a bit like ‘oh god, what have we done?’ But it’s work, isn’t it. You have to just keep going.”
From the start, the idea was to create something entirely its own.
Matilda explained: “I think for us it’s always been quite clear that, because of where we are, we need people to come out of their way to come and eat with us. So we need to offer something that’s unique. So that’s always been part of whatever we’re creating. It has to be different from what you can get elsewhere.”
On the food side, that difference is presented in a couple of ways.
Firstly, there’s Tom’s cooking, which blends fresh Scottish ingredients with Asian influences.
Even to its creator, it’s a little hard to pin down.
“We used to use terms that mean nothing,” said Tom.
“We used to say ‘it’s modern cookery’. It doesn’t tell you anything. So now we just say it’s a vegetable and seafood-heavy menu. Some of it you might find unusual but you have to trust us. And it’s kind of got quite a lot of Asian influence.”
Trust is a big part of the experience. Guests (12 at the dining tables, plus an additional chef’s table) are provided a tasting menu of up to 20 courses, and only receive a menu when they’re finished their meal.
Tom explained: “We used to give people a menu at the very beginning, and they would scan all the way down it and find the things they were terrified of and then sit there shaking for an hour. So now we give you the menu at the very end.
“There’s stuff that, if we told you what was in some of the courses, you would never order them.
“Our chocolate pudding’s got shrimp in it. We serve puddings with shrimp and pork and black pudding. We serve some odd food. Even now, we serve a squid stew. When we bring it to people, if they’d seen squid stew written on the menu and then we brought this plate out, they would never equate those two things. Because it is and also very much isn’t a squid stew.
“Also I think there’s a thing about country house hotels where people think there’s a style of food that’s served in country house hotels.
“We are not cooking that style of food.”
A sample menu from February includes courses such as ‘Singapore Chilli’ Lobster Croustade; Oat Tofu (with Doubanjiang, brown crab and radish); French Onion Jelly (with smoked caviar, turnip cream and dried miso); and BBQ Squid, Not BBQ’d (with wild garlic and beetroot).
In addition to working with a range of suppliers, Tom and his small kitchen team also use ingredients from the restaurant’s own garden.
This, too, was an adjustment.
“I was under the impression that you put the seeds in the ground and nature did the rest,” Tom lamented.
“It turns out it’s incredibly labour intensive, gardening.”
Subsequently, the couple now employ a full-time gardener to take care of that for them.
And those changing ingredients feed into what is a regularly changing menu – something that suits Killiecrankie House’s customer base just fine.
“The truth is that repeat customers are coming back, by and large, because we’re changing the menu,” said Tom.
“If they came now and then they came in August, it would not be the same thing. We have the kitchen garden, we’re using the stuff from it, so of course that dictates (the menu) as well. And then there’s also stuff like, if you come in November and the weather’s crap, the boats aren’t going out.
“So there might not be day boat fish or langoustines or whatever it is. We have to work with what’s available to us. We’re not the kind of restaurant who, if we can’t get the thing we want, just make the same dish with a slightly crapper product. We just change the course.”
Front of house, Matilda is responsible for making sure the drinks range is able to complement anything that comes from the kitchen.
“There’s people I work with that I know their palate is the same as mine,” said Matilda.
“They understand the food we’re trying to cook and what sort of drinks that would pair well with the menu. I trust them in that regard, so I can say ‘there’s this dish coming on, it’s got these sorts of flavours and textures, do you have anything in this ballpark that would work?’
“But we are always looking. We will get people that will come to us that we haven’t heard of. We’re always open to new suppliers.”
Service, too, is something Matilda, who is half-Japanese, takes very seriously.
“In Japan the service is great,” she said.
“They have this phrase in Japanese about ‘reading the air’. It’s about understanding if the customers want more chat, less chat, if they are happy amongst themselves or if they want more information about the food or the wine or whatever. Sort of reading your customer.
“We’re also not pretentious, stuffy people. We’re not particularly formal. So always we’ve said our service style is friendly but knowledgeable. If you want to know about the exact wine-making technique of this thing, we’ll know it. Or exactly where this ingredient is from, we can do that. But if you just want to eat, fine.”
The approach is working.
Last November Killiecrankie House was named SLTN Restaurant of the Year (Fine Dining) and earlier this year was awarded a Michelin Star.
But those accolades haven’t blunted Tom or Matilda’s pursuit of perfection.
He said: “I’m consistently unhappy with the menu even though I know that the menu is very good. I’m always like ‘we could change this thing and that might improve it’ and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes, logistically, it’s a nightmare.
“And sometimes it would be a great idea and we definitely should do it but we need two more people. And so we have to shelve the idea until we’ve got more staff.
“But the food here is good. It’s really good.”
