ONE DAY back in 1992 Peter Irvine got in his open-topped Peugeot 308 in Edinburgh and set out to find Scotland. He travelled up to the Highlands and the Islands. He went down to the Borders. He visited all the cities. And on the way he called in on restaurants and bars and chippies and tea rooms and hotels and tourist attractions. All in search of the best examples of each in the country.

At the time Irvine, co-founder of Scotland’s first music promotion company Regular Music, thought he had finished his career in music. That turned out to not be the case. Even so, at the time he was keen to take a break. “I thought, ‘I’ll go around Scotland,’” he recalls all these years later as we sit drinking cappuccinos in Artisan Roast in Edinburgh’s Broughton Street.

The problem was he couldn’t find a guide to where to go. “There were one or two guides like The Good Hotel Guide or the Good Food Guide,” he explains. “But there was nothing particularly about Scotland except the Cadogan Guide.”

So, Irvine decided to come up with one of his own. Everywhere he went that year and the next he made notes. And in 1994 those notes became a book, Scotland the Best.

Last year Peter Irvine got in the same Peugeot 308 and did it all again.

And so, 25 years after that first edition, the 13th edition of Scotland The Best is here. More than 400 pages of tightly packed recommendations (2,000 of them. And counting). It covers all the things that the first book covered and more. You want the best fusion and Japanese restaurants in Glasgow? Turn to page 101. The country’s great wild swimming holes? That will be page 290.

It’s a user’s guide, Irvine says. One for the traveller in a hurry. “I don’t have a lot of time. I’m always impatient. I like to get to the best places. I don’t want to spend an hour looking for a restaurant on Falkirk’s high street.” Hmm, I’m not sure an hour would be long enough anyway, I tell him.

But it’s the distance between then and now, first edition and 13th edition that I want to measure today. How has Scotland changed in those 25 years in terms of food and drink, accommodation and everything else? Irvine may be the best person to answer those questions. He’s informed and opinionated, with his own prejudices and bugbears (camper van owners might want to look away). If anyone can tell us where we are now, he is.

Then again, part of the answer is already clear on my walk from Waverley Station to Artisan Roast. Beyond the now demolished St James Centre, which will eventually be home to a new W Hotel and a concert hall, I pass by the Deep Sea chippy in Antigua Street, the Barony Bar in Broughton Street, both entries in Irvine’s guide book.

Pickles wine bar (where Irvine could have been found drinking the night before we meet) is in the same street, and, if I look to the right as I pass Forth Street, I can see Jerome Henry’s Le Roi Fou restaurant – like Artisan Roast it gets two ticks in Irvine’s guide book, which means “Among the best (of its type) in Britain”.

This part of Edinburgh is essentially Irvine’s home turf and in this one small area of the city alone you can mark the difference between Scotland in the early 1990s and today. “When I started there would be nothing here. Not one place,” he admits.

But countrywide the picture isn’t quite as clear cut. Improvements have been made, but the changes are asymmetrical. I want to ask Irvine what Scotland is getting right and what it needs still to address.

That’s what is on the menu this March afternoon. Appropriately, we start with food.

FOOD

“Food is what we do now. Even millennials don’t go to nightclubs; they go to restaurants. People eat out all the time. It is a very different eating landscape, but then it is everywhere in Britain.

“Scotland is at the forefront of using local ingredients, of home cooking, of presenting in a contemporary way. All these improvements in food are because there’s a demand for it.

“Expectations have increased, demand is greater. That stimulates people and, provided they can find a place where the rates are low, anybody who is really mad about food can open a restaurant.

“We didn’t have food quarters before. The food quarters in Edinburgh are Stockbridge and Bruntsfield, and in Glasgow in Hyndland and now in Finnieston. And people pile in because you have a choice.

“It’s an urban thing to have a food quarter, so smaller cities and towns don’t really have that. In places like Dundee there is much less concentration of good places to eat.”

Read More: Scotland's best restaurants of 2018

DRINK

“We always had the traditional pubs. I used to have a category called old-style pubs and some of them are still there. The best original pubs in Edinburgh; The Diggers, The Royal Oak, The Oxford, which Ian Rankin made famous, and Mathers. Those pubs still remain from the old days

“Within the last 10 years there has been a craft beer revolution. There are micro-breweries everywhere. And there are gin distilleries. We’ve embraced gin hugely. All that small batch [distilling] has only come within the last two or three years. It’s grown exponentially very quickly. Prior to that last edition gin wasn’t worth mentioning.

“A larger number of places also have a selection of malts. In the case of the Pot Still in Glasgow, 750 or so. I believe that tourists would like to go to the Bon Accord in Glasgow or The Grill in Aberdeen in Union Street, which is a temple to whiskies. It’s an ordinary pub in Union Street. I didn’t find it until the last edition. It had been there forever. It has a bible of whiskies lying on the bar.”

Read More: Scotland's 50 Best Bars, part one

Read More: Scotland's 50 Best Bars, part two

ACCOMMODATION

“Accommodation is driven by demand and investment. You can open a coffee shop on a corner pretty quickly and cheaply, but to open a boutique hotel costs a lot.

“The growth of contemporary hotels outside the city is still pretty slow. Scotland is also plagued by the short season. It’s famous for rain and cold and inclement weather, so businesses used to close at the end of September and maybe not open until the end of March.

“That’s changed a lot and is changing rapidly at the moment. The season is extending from February all the way through to October and maybe November. Scotland is booming for tourists. Or at least parts of it are. And that includes the Highlands. So, to refurbish old hotels into something contemporary and right up there with current expectations of sophisticated travellers is difficult.

“The secret is to present heritage in a contemporary way with all the niceties, all the things we actually want now. We have to have wi-fi. Hotels have to have a spa.

“But we do have three new hotels that are opening in rural areas. They are, of course, the Fife Arms in Deeside where millions have been spent.

The second one is the Roxburghe Hotel in the Borders where I’m from. It’s by Kelso. It’s always been there. It was run by the Duke of Roxburghe on his estate. It looks over to Floors Castle and it’s built around a golf course. It’s always been in the book, but it was closed two years ago, and it’s been bought by European money and it’s turning into a very upmarket four- or five-star hotel.

“And the third one is the Machrie hotel in Islay, which has always been there as a dilapidated hotel on a famously unforgiving and wild golf course. That’s been bought over by a consummate hotelier and he’s spent a lot of money on it and it’s already open.

“Those three hotels are in very rural areas and each one of them will transform the area that they’re in. On Islay you can easily go there for a week, stay in really good places north or south, and there’s a few restaurants. So, even in that little microcosm, that’s working

“Skye has completely taken off. There’s this whole thing about how Skye’s full. Last year it was. But what’s happened there is that demand, which is formidable, has now driven this spate of new restaurants and new hotels. So, there are two or three new hotels in Skye in the last year, owned and run by Skye guys. One or two of them are run by the chefs, so they’re restaurants with rooms. A whole food scene has evolved there. You don’t need to go anywhere else. If you love food, you can spend two weeks on Skye no problem and eat well every night. That’s all new.

“[In the cities] all these really high-end hotels have opened here. Not so much in Glasgow. The disparity is now obvious, and I don’t know what one does about that because, actually, the hotels in Glasgow are often half the price.

“There isn’t a room rate anymore because it’s all dynamic pricing, which makes the idea of tourist tax irrelevant. The room rate tonight in a hotel up the road will be different than it is tomorrow night. And next Wednesday it could be different again because it depends on how many people want to stay there. Because many people do, prices are high in Edinburgh.”

Read More: Overcrowding on Skye

CULTURE

“We have very few new trophy buildings in Scotland apart from the parliament at Holyrood and the V&A. They’re the only two worth talking about. And the V&A was supposed to have a transformational effect and I think we can say that it has. The restaurant is very good and is a destination in itself. But there’s a real challenge there to keep that going because they can only do two exhibitions a year.

“Nevertheless, Dundee is very much on our thoughts and everyone I know has gone there to see the V&A. And as a building it doesn’t disappoint.

“Personally, I think Dundee should have a festival as well. I was part of the European City of Culture bid for Dundee. It was cancelled because Brexit cancelled everything. That was a huge disappointment, not just for Dundee, but for Scotland, because it would have been transformational.”

Read More: The Man who built V&A Dundee

SERVICE

“There is a view that we could do a lot better. In cities you get sharp service. In smaller towns and rural areas, of course, that is much less likely. But a lot of Scotland and its appeal is to do with landscape, so you actually have to allow for that, I think.

“We should substitute smartness and the clicking of heels and the flicking of napkins with kindness and humour and more human aspects.

“The challenge in rural areas with these new hotels opening and staying open longer in the season is how do you get the staff and how do you keep the staff?

“Last summer they were all really concerned about Brexit and how they can attract people to their far-flung place when there’s a general shortage of people in the kitchen – from kitchen porters to chefs – and out front. That’s a real difficulty, and people who are thinking of opening new places need to think twice about where they’re going to get the staff, where they’re going to put them up and what that’s going to cost.”

INFRASTRUCTURE

“What we love about the north is that the landscape is fabulous, and the roads are windy, and the views are breath-taking. But with more and more people on the roads that becomes frustrating and difficult.

“These single-track roads were not built for this amount of traffic, and, unfortunately, lots of people don’t know how to drive on them.

“I’ve stopped people in the middle of Skye. I just said, ‘I don’t know if you know, but on these roads you have to look out for other cars. And it’s not just the ones coming towards you. You pull over for the traffic behind too.’ Because I had been there for 45 minutes flashing my lights honking my horn.

“And I hate doing that because this is a quiet place. I don’t want to be banging my horn.

“This was a camper van, which I have a particular thing about. The dichotomy of that is when places are expensive to stay in and are possibly full, hiring a camper van is quite a good option. But you have to learn to be able to drive on Highland roads and I think at the beginning of the Skye Bridge they should have a checkpoint for camper vans and say, ‘You’re very welcome. Now, this is how you drive.’”

WHERE IN SCOTLAND NEEDS TO UP ITS GAME?

“Do places need to up their game? The places that are … not suffering but not doing nearly as well, are off the track. Visitors who come to Scotland, they don’t look down. They don’t look south, they look north. Edinburgh’s the gateway. They may go to Glasgow, they might now go to Dundee. Let’s hope that they do.

“But, mainly, they’re looking north and they’re looking at those single-track roads and an infrastructure that, who knows how it’s going to cope?

“In southwest Scotland and the Borders the roads are empty. Now, upping its game is a response to that, but, actually, it’s much more complicated than that. Because we don’t want a game. We don’t want it upped.

“We want to appreciate those parts of Scotland that are quiet for exactly that and I think it would rally spoil it if they were really busy tourist hubs.

“However, Dumfriesshire needs more good restaurants, especially Dumfries town itself. But now there’s a great restaurant in Castle Douglas which for years has been the food town. Ha ha ha. It had an Italian that was quite good. But now it has a lovely bakery [Earth’s Crust Bakery] and a lovely restaurant [Mr Pook’s Kitchen].

“I go to the Wigtown Book Festival most years and it’s now got great cafes and stuff. So here and there, there are really good things.

“In the meantime, it has fabulous beaches lovely coastline great walks, hills in the middle Galloway Forest and the light, the fabulous Solway light.

“And my view is that, in the not too distant future places, like that will be really precious. They will be somewhere for providing for the people who are looking for not solitude but quietude.”

Scotland the Best by Peter Irvine is published by Collins, at £15.99.