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This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Edinburgh
“Roberta is known for her pies,” says one of her colleagues as we sit down for lunch at The Little Chartroom, a 30-cover restaurant on a quiet street just a few blocks from the Leith waterfront. I pray with every ounce of my being that there is one on the menu today.
Chef Roberta Hall-McCarron’s pie-making has become her signature, ever since she appeared on the 2021 season of the television competition show Great British Menu. She cooked a beef pie, using shin and cheek meat, which she layered with ox tongue-studded chicken mousse, caramelised onions and Parma ham. Ensuring that the judges achieved their required daily caloric intake and five-a-day, it was served with a red-wine sauce, a jug of beef consommé and baby vegetables.
This dish reflects the essence of Hall-McCarron’s cooking: comforting, gutsy, skilful, a showcase of French and British culinary techniques and a celebration of Scottish ingredients — and far more exciting to experience in person than on the sofa. Hall-McCarron and her husband Shaun run three Edinburgh eateries in their growing mini-empire; The Little Chartroom is their firstborn.
“We put everything that we had saved into it,” Hall-McCarron says. “We wanted to create something that we thought Edinburgh was missing — a more casual style of restaurant that still serves great food and has excellent service. [At the time] there was a bit of a divide between really high-end places and really casual places, and we wanted to fill that middle ground.”
On a Sunday afternoon, energy levels among our group are rather low, after dining at the excellent Lyla the previous night and taking a zero-waste approach to the generous wine pairing, but the menu at The Little Chartroom is reviving. Warm soda bread and salty butter soak up some sins; a creamy rhubarb and custard cocktail takes the edge off; and oysters with jalapeño and dill pickle — sweet and spicy with tingling heat — awaken the senses. We each choose three courses (£68) from a short menu (an £89 five-course tasting menu is also available).
I start with a pasta dish that will haunt my dreams for the foreseeable future: the perfect parcels of agnolotti, stuffed with potato and mushrooms are delivered in a pool of creamy mushroom sauce, with vibrant notes of wild garlic, earthy truffle shavings and a piquant cavolo-nero pesto. What on the surface sounds simple has so much personality, so much punch — it is, in all senses of the word, stunning. “I find making pasta very therapeutic,” says Hall-McCarron. Eating it is too.
Food envy strikes when another guest at my table is delivered her steak: a bang-on pink sirloin with barbecue chicory, a rich bone-marrow sauce and, the pièce de résistance, haggis dauphine: potatoes layered with cream, spiced offal and a crispy topping. But out comes my pie.
This pie, a pithivier, if I may, happens to be a work of art: a round, fluted puff-pastry parcel filled with thinly sliced potato and unctuous Taleggio cheese, which oozes magnificently out the middle when I cut into it. (It’s served with a simple green salad; the acidity balances the starchy, cheesy richness and the greens offer relief to my arteries.)
“I mean this in the best way possible,” I say delicately to Hall-McCarron, “but it sort of reminds me of a macaroni pie,” referring to the inspired Scottish pastime of stuffing carbs with carbs and cheese.
“It’s that [combination] of nostalgia and food . . . there’s definitely comfort there,” she says. “My family used to have a business that made a lot of pies. They were different to what I do — they used to retail to supermarkets and whatnot — but there’s a bit of a full-circle thing going on with the pies.”
With her parents’ encouragement, Hall-McCarron had her first taste of a professional kitchen at age 16, during a week’s work experience at Edinburgh’s The Tower Restaurant. She returned to school determined to become a chef. “I fell in love with it — it was instant,” she says. “I just loved the environment and the creativity . . . I ended up working part-time there while I was finishing school.”
She has since notched up experience in the kitchens of the Burj al Arab in Dubai, one of the most recognisable hotels in the world, and Edinburgh’s Michelin-starred The Kitchin. She also helped set up Castle Terrace, one of the Scottish capital’s other top restaurants, where she met her now-husband.
After briefly running a rural gastropub in Cambridgeshire, the couple returned to Edinburgh and in 2018 opened The Little Chartroom, earning scores of fans and delighting the critics. Eleanore, their neighbourhood bistro and wine bar, joined the family in 2021, while Ardfern, an all-day café, bar and bottle shop opened next door to Little Chartroom earlier this year.
Our lunch finishes with panna cotta — it’s rhubarb season when we visit, so the vegetable has been sweetened and stewed, and served on top of the vanilla-infused set cream with a lovely almond granola. It is tasty, light and texturally pleasing — and underscores the spirit of the meal: seemingly simple dishes in Hall-McCarron’s hands well exceed expectations.
Opening times: Monday–Thursday, 6pm–11pm (last bookings 8pm); Friday–Saturday, 1pm–4.30pm (last bookings 2pm) and 6pm–11pm (last bookings 8.30pm); Sunday, 1pm–4.30pm (last bookings 2pm) and 6pm–11pm (last bookings 8pm). 14 Bonnington Road, Edinburgh EH6 5JD; thelittlechartroom.com
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