NATURE’S GIFT
Christmas dinner with a foraged feel from Scott Smith at Norn restaurant
Some chefs fall into cooking, but for Scott Smith, the owner and head chef at Norn in Edinburgh, it was a glorious combination of nature and nurture that inspired his love of food. The 28-year-old knew from the tender age of 15 that this was his calling. ‘I started as a pot washer in a wee restaurant outside Aberdeen, taking time off school every now and again to get my foot in the door,’ recalls Scott. But it was helping his grandma pick berries and peas in the garden as a child and enjoying the fresh food that his mother cooked for him from the produce she grew in her own garden that really sparked his passion. Growing up in the countryside gave Scott an awareness of nature’s larder. ‘I worked at The Peat Inn (near St Andrews) for a couple of years, that’s where I got most of my training and ambition,’ says Scott. ‘We’d get girolles and chanterelles from a local forager and there was a kitchen porter who would forage in his breaks and then show me what to do with what he found. He even made his own beer.’
Now running his own restaurant, Scott sees foraging as a way of creating something new and unique for the diner, a way to ensure they’re not serving up the same food as every other restaurant. ‘There’s something really exciting about cooking with foraged produce. There’s always a different flavour or texture. It’s just a really good way of reconnecting with nature.’
The Norn team take weekly foraging trips. East Lothian is a favourite location which always provides a good mix of woodland and coastal ingredients; so, too, is Blair Atholl. ‘We get lots of mushrooms and woodland herbs, like wood sorrel,’ he says. ‘At the moment we’re finding elderberries, sloes and rowan berries, and we do a lot of pickling, fermenting, curing, smoking and salting too.’ And in the spirit of Christmas, the team have been experimenting with pine as a food flavouring too.
With plans afoot for a kitchen garden on the outskirts of the capital with a view to growing the vast majority of the restaurants produce there, it seems that Norn’s ethos will remain firmly rooted in nature.