Andrew Fairlie
Chef who won Michelin stars and championed Scottish food
ANDREW FAIRLIE, who has died aged 55, was a Perthshire-born chef who set out to prove that Scottish food is not all haggis and shortbread; as head chef at One Devonshire Gardens, Glasgow, he won his first Michelin star in 1996; in 2001 he established his own restaurant at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire, winning his first star there the following year and becoming the only two-michelin-star chef in Scotland in 2006.
Andrew Fairlie was born on November 21 1963 and brought up in a cramped three-bedroomed council house at Letham, Perth, where he lived with his parents, Jim and Kay, and four siblings. His father was an economics teacher, and as a child Andrew enjoyed helping him to cook the evening meal so it would be ready when his mother came in from her work in a shoe shop.
At Perth Academy, however, he was regarded as a “wild child”, always getting into trouble and refusing to conform.
From the age of 14 he worked part-time waiting at the Station Hotel in Perth where, aged 15, he experienced what he called his “tarragon moment”: “One Saturday afternoon I nicked a spoonful of beef chasseur. ‘Oh my God,’ I thought, ‘what the hell is that?’ I went straight into the kitchen and asked the chef, who explained I was tasting fresh tarragon. I … realised I was on the wrong side of the pass. I sat my last exam and started work in the kitchen the next day.”
He became an apprentice cook under the hotel’s head chef, Keith Podmore, whom he followed to London to work at Boodle’s gentlemen’s club.
In 1984, aged 21, Fairlie won the first Roux Scholarship for young chefs, the prize being a threemonth placement in Michel Guérard’s Les Prés d’eugénie in Gascony. “This introduced me to a whole new culture,” he recalled. “I loved going to markets and watching women pick up lungs and pigs’ heads and give them a sniff. It really educated me about produce.”
Guérard arranged a two-year stint for Fairlie at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris. He stuck it out, but the experience mainly taught him about the sort of kitchen he did not want to run: “It was absolutely horrific … brutal, horrible, violent. One time I was smacked around the back with a full roll of cling film; another I had an aluminium basin of ice water dumped on my head.”
After working at various establishments in France, Africa, Australia and as a chef on the Royal Scotsman, he joined One Devonshire Gardens in 1994, beginning his rise to Michelin-starred eminence at Gleneagles.
Fairlie won many other accolades, including being named a Relais & Chateaux Grand Chef, one of only seven in the UK, in 2011. In 2012 he topped the Sunday Times Food List, its editor, Karen Robinson, praising his “insistence on using the finest ingredients, available from local Scottish hillsides and waters, and the way he introduces exotic influences while never blindly following trends”.
Fairlie’s father Jim was deputy leader of the SNP from 1981 to 1984 and in the run-up to the referendum on independence, Andrew served on the advisory board of Yes Scotland. When he came out as proindependence he got emails from people saying that they would never again eat in his restaurant. Yet it went on to have its best year ever.
Fairlie had been diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2005. Though he underwent surgery the cancer returned, requiring bouts of chemotherapy. In November he announced that he was stepping down from his restaurant after revealing that the cancer was terminal.
Fairlie’s first marriage, to Ashley, was dissolved. Last November he married, secondly, Kate White, who survives him with the two daughters of his first marriage and two stepdaughters.
Andrew Fairlie, born November 21 1963, died January 22 2019