It’s surely a sign of growth that not one but two independent food studios are to open in Scotland: one in Edinburgh and the other in Glasgow. What’s a food studio, I hear you ask? Well, it’s not exactly a restaurant and neither is it a college classroom; it’s somewhere in between, with creativity at the centre.

It’s a place where talented, experienced and well-travelled young chefs create dishes that, in true Scandi style, celebrate the ancient Scottish terroir (both land and sea) with modern cooking techniques.

Diners are crowd-sourced via social media, and the experience includes watching the chef cook the dishes, before eating them and sharing the experience. These food studios are also places that claim to put no stock in egotism, pretence or elitism.

Ben Reade and Sashana Souza Zanella crowdfunded their Edinburgh Food Studio, which opens next week, to the tune of over £17,000. They intend to produce a “cutting edge and delicious” dining experience using traditional Scots recipes and ingredients in new ways (I can’t wait to see what they will do with the old-fashioned Scottish macaroon using Ayrshire potatoes: will they use the traditional icing sugar and coconut, or something else?); Craig Grozier’s Studio 93, which opens in Glasgow’s West End next month, will be educational and “cutting edge”, only using locally sourced foods. The chef rejects the suggestion that Studio 93 is a pop-up. He prefers to describe it as “guerrilla bespoke dining”.

In both ventures, collaboration is key. Rather than being top-down or dictatorial these young foodies want to share and learn with others. Half of any profits made by EFS will be invested in further research of Scottish food.

Studio 93 is a natural development for Grozier’s company Fallachan Dining where works as a private cook for clients such as Glasgow University, Glasgow School of Art, Uniquely Scotland Culinary Adventures and others, while also holding culinary academies and farmhouse dinners on Islay with The Botanist gin, based at the Bruichladdich Distillery. On these ventures he works closely with forager Mark Williams of Galloway Wild Foods, and 90% of the food served is locally sourced: beef heart from Octomore farm on Islay and bread made with malted barley from the Octomore whisky distilling took centre stage.

Grozier, who has done stages at l’Enclume, Hibiscus, Tom Aikens and the Ledbury in London, has recently returned from the Bar Convent Berlin international drinks show where he provided Scottish canapes: his carrot cracker with seabuckthorn, birch jelly, cep and hazelnut went down a storm. He has also completed a stage at Ralae in Copenhagen, rated among the world’s top 50 restaurants.

Connections with London chefs are being forged and consolidated. Earlier this week Reade (who, as regular readers will know, is former head of culinary research and development at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen, and project manager of the MAD symposium) was one of 40 of the world’s progressive chefs to address the international Food on the Edge symposium in Galway, Ireland, earlier this week. Its stated aim is to challenge our perspective on food and our connection to it, and this year the theme was the future of food. Reade’s paper was on Food Biochemistry and our sensory reactions to taste; his friends, chefs Tom Aikens, Nathan Outlaw, James Petrie and Claire Smyth, were also there. He and Souza Zanella plan to work on “really serious collaborations” in future.

Grozier will be working at Studio 93 with Ian Scaramuzza of the two-Michelin starred Hibiscus in Mayfair, and is in contact with Jason Atherton’s acclaimed Pollen Street Social. He will be collaborating with Ben Reade and with Buck and Birch, the Edinburgh dining company also headed by young chefs with Scandinavian connections, and whose head chef describes himself as a “grower, bird plucker, butcher, brewer, fermenter and curer”.

His first Studio 93 academy dinner is on November 30. The menu includes wild hare with Wooster berry, beetroot, and fresh hare blood seasoned with The Botanist gin.

Diners will eat at one big table. “We want to be touching elbows with other foodies, discussing ideas, enjoying conviviality. It’s the furthest away from elitist you can imagine,” says the Glasgow chef, who also works with local community gardens and food banks. He’s not alone in claiming that eating this way is the future.

Reade points out that food businesses these days are constrained by putting them in “boxes” such as a cafe or a restaurant or a takeaway, and that he wanted to start something different, because food is much more complex than that. Too often, food in Scotland is seen merely as fuel.

Given all this collaborative culinary activity taking place “under the radar”, so to speak, you do wonder what will happen to the conventional aspiration to open one’s own restaurant.

More than that, though, it adds momentum to the suggestion that Scotland could and should be hosting international food symposiums like those in Galway and Copenhagen. And would it be too much to hope that the establishment of a Scottish Culinary Academy might not be too far off?

edinburghfoodstudio.com

fallachandining.co.uk

@catedvinewriter