Dream comes true as Graeme Cheevers takes over as Herald Magazine chef

“It takes a bit of organisation but it’s great fun and I’ve really enjoyed it,” says Wishart. “I’ve particularly loved doing the Christmas specials, and creating recipes specially for my column from food I’ve eaten or foraged in places I’ve travelled to.

“I enjoyed getting regular feedback from customers at my cook school, in the restaurant, and great discussions about the recipes.

“Every now and then I’d get a call from a reader into the kitchen on a Saturday night asking me to go through that day’s recipe again, usually because they’ve missed something.”

And he picked up an unusual skill for a chef, too. “I learned how to type on the back of this gig.”

Favourites for the charismatic 46-year-old father of three are his reestit mutton and tattie soup from Shetland, where his family are from. This is the dish he also made, using floury Shetland Black potatoes, for his boss, Michel Roux, when he worked at Le Gavroche in London.

Other favourites include ricotta ravioli and salted ling, inspired by holidays in Sardinia; and hay-roasted Gigha halibut cooked on the beach.

Cheevers says the move is a dream come true: “I used to cut out Martin’s recipes and practise them when working as sous chef to Geoffrey Smeddle at Etain [Terence Conran’s fine-dining Glasgow restaurant, which he opened in 2003 and closed in 2006, and where Smeddle was head chef until he opened The Peat Inn in Fife]. I’d practise things like Martin’s pigs’ trotters on toast, salmon wrapped in bacon and drizzled with olive oil and fennel seeds and steamed, and his Armagnac parfait.”

Graeme Cheevers admits he had to pester Martin Wishart for a job

He joined Wishart at Loch Lomond in 2010, becoming head chef in late 2011 – and maintaining ever since the Michelin star gained earlier that year by former head chef Stewart Boyles.

Cheevers, who is single and lives in Erskine and has a four year old daughter called Kira, started working in kitchens aged 15 and progressed to working with some of the world’s top chefs – Thomas Keller’s three Michelin-starred Per Se and Swiss-born Daniel Humm’s three-star Eleven Madison Park, both in New York, among them – before setting his sights on Scotland and specifically the kitchen he runs. But getting a job here wasn’t straightforward.

“I used to come here with my dad. In fact we were the first customers when it opened in November 2008,” he recalls.

“Martin was always there, working with Stewart, but no matter how many times I asked he’d never give me a job. Then one day I came in to book a table for my dad and me, and he thought my name was John because it was my middle name on the booking. I was walking out to the car park when Stewart came running after me shouting “John! Do you want some work?” He was short-staffed at the time, so I got lucky. I started as a commis in pastry and I Continued on Page 26 if you kept your head down and stuck it out you could go quite far in the industry because it was a very difficult climate and lots of people didn’t last long. It’s not the same now, because the hours and the atmosphere are much more relaxed.

“Having said that, I’m doing a five and a half day week, and 14 hours a day, serving about 250 diners a week. Doing The Herald Magazine recipes on top of that is a challenge I’m really looking forward to, because it’s a good discipline and it makes you think about the food from the readers’ point of view, for they are home cooks rather than chefs.

“It will be difficult to explain to readers who may not have the knowledge or experience how to blanche and peel a tomato, or how to cut vegetables, or skin a fish, that could take up a whole paragraph, for example. I’ll have to learn how to do that. But that’s a good discipline. It makes you think of people at home reading it and working out how to do it.”

Wishart says: “What I noticed about Graeme early on was the attention he paid to what he was doing, and his passion really shone out. When Stewart left, I had to choose who would replace him. My only small doubt about appointing Graeme was his lack of experience in running a team, because that’s vitally important. Getting on with the guys is more important than keeping books. If you don’t have the team behind you, you don’t get the consistency in the food and it shows in the restaurant. But he has proved himself to be a real leader as well as a well-liked and respected team player, and he treats his suppliers with respect. If it hadn’t worked we’d have lost the Michelin star.

“Graeme’s always on the lookout for new cooking techniques and does a lot of research for recipes and seeks out suppliers for specific ingredients. In fact, he helped me out on quite a few of The Herald Magazine recipes.”

Like Wishart, Cheevers is trained in the classic French style. Given that both chefs left school at 15 and travelled the world to hone their skills, are readers likely to spot any differences between them in terms of cooking styles and recipes?

A keen runner and fan of fast cars, he often travels to Holland and Belgium for food inspiration, and two members of his five-strong kitchen brigade take some of their influences from frequent visits to Japan.

Curds, flavoursome sauces and vegetable juices are some of the characteristics of his restaurant menu at Loch Lomond, which has a six-course vegetable tasting menu featuring such dishes as Muscade de Provence pumpkin tortellini with fontina, sage and chestnut cappuccino, and roasted baby hispi cabbage. There’s an emphasis, too, on west of Scotland meat and shellfish, and dairy produce from Katy Rodgers of Fintry.

“I regularly visit Holland and Belgium, as they’re my favourite places and they have a very similar food culture to ours,” he says. “They have great shellfish and vegetables, and their terroir is very similar to Scotland’s. I like to see what their chefs do with their produce.

“They also do great things with their iconic dishes like mussels and chips, and a fabulous Flemish beef stew with Belgian ale. Sometimes they do it better than us, sometimes they don’t. It gives me confidence in what we’re doing and the restaurant, and it gives me inspiration for my Herald column.”

He often guest cooks at pop-up events and enjoys Nordic-inspired cooking, though he reckons the Scandi cuisine trend is just a phase.

“It’s not something I’m interested in. The fashionable Scandi techniques like fermenting and curing all go back to classic French cuisine. If you chase trends, what happens when the trend is over? Modern European cuisine using classic techniques will never die.”

He reassures readers that his recipes won’t be difficult or too “cheffy”. He says they will be aimed at busy families and will be “simple, rustic and quick, using ingredients you can buy in independent local shops and good quality supermarkets”. Readers can expect slow-cooked ox cheek stews, interesting salads, and an emphasis on vegetables.

“A lot of people say they don’t like cooking because it takes too much effort and preparation. The British culture is still quite lazy when it comes to cooking. I want to show readers they can do these things really quickly, rather than throwing something ready-made in the oven and waiting for half an hour for it to be ready.”

So is The Herald Magazine’s quietly-spoken new chef ready for media stardom? “I just like cooking,” he says. “I can’t wait to get started on connecting with readers and customers, but I’m not looking for celebrity. I just want to carry on cooking.”