One of the most creative, exciting and brave young cooks around, East Londoner Tom Tsappis, the Owner and Chef Patron of Killiecrankie House in Perthshire, didn’t take the usual route into the kitchen.
When did food become an interest?
I was working in the financial markets, and I had moved to Japan where I was lucky enough to be taken to plenty of great restaurants as part of my work. The food in Japan is excellent but it is Japanese. If you’re over there and missing something from home, it’s really hard to find. So, I started cooking the dishes I missed and that’s where the embers of my career as a chef started.
How quickly did it take to find your place?
We saw 15 places over a period of 2 weeks in May 2020. Killiecrankie House was open and previously running as a traditional country house hotel with lots of tartan. With eleven smaller bedrooms, it catered for an older demographic who would come to take in the beautiful surroundings, walk their dog or sit in the garden. We knew it needed a big renovation as it didn’t fit with what we wanted to bring to life. It’s a 200-year-old building so when you start taking the wallpaper off, you discover a lot of things that you didn’t know were there, so the renovation snowballed a little.
Are you happy with how it’s gone?
We have all sorts of plans. We have a root cellar coming, a smokehouse in the garden, bees, so there is plenty more to come. When we opened, we had six members of staff. We’re now at 11 with three new people arriving in the next few months.
Describe your cooking style?
We didn’t used to describe it at all but after a while we felt we had to because lots of people thought they were coming to a French restaurant. Our food is Scottish ingredients cooked using Japanese techniques, but the pillar of our food is creativity. The food you eat here, you will not eat anywhere else.
Your kitchen is very open – what does that bring to the dining experience?
We’re a very chilled out team and our kitchen is in the middle of the room so it’s as open as it gets. We don’t differentiate between the front and back of the house. The chefs will serve the plates. By the time guests leave they will have spoken to pretty much every member of staff.
What flavours are you testing?
At the moment, I have been doing a lot with Japanese dashi stock, which is integral to our cooking, and we also make our own tofu, which you don’t see much. Dashi is made from seaweed and katsuobushi. We have loads of seaweed in Scotland but katsuobushi is a dried piece of fermented bonito fish that has been smoked until it’s lost all of its moisture. It’s shaved into these really thin flakes. We don’t have bonito, so we have been working out how to make our own. The one we really like is venison. We’re curing venison in koji, so essentially curing it in mould. Then we smoke it over peat for between 5 and 10 days until it’s lost 90% of its moisture. Then it’s shaved using a katsuobushi grater I bought in Tokyo and used as a base for a broth. What we have is a beautiful Scottish dish. It’s local venison from here but it’s not Scottish in people’s minds.
For more information, visit www.killiecrankiehouse.com
