At Torabhaig, Smoke with Taste isn’t just how we make our whisky - it’s how we see the world. Smoke should bring out flavour, not overwhelm it. On the Isle of Skye, this balance is shared and practiced by The Dunvegan - a fire restaurant run by chef Tim Hunter-Davies, his wife Blair, and their son Ru, on the island’s rugged western edge.
We sat down with the family to talk about life on Skye, cooking over open fire, and how our latest dram, Sound of Sleat, fits right in.
Can you introduce yourselves and The Dunvegan?
Tim: The Dunvegan is a fire restaurant based on the Isle of Skye. We create dishes using homegrown, local, and sustainably sourced ingredients, all cooked exclusively over fire.
What inspires your approach to cooking over fire?
Tim: The exciting thing about cooking with fire and smoke is the different nuanced flavours and tastes that you can achieve using different types of wood, different intensity of heat and flame. Every ingredient and every dish needs a different measure of all of those things to create something unique to taste and enjoy.
Blair: You’re not messing around, you’re literally just taking an amazing raw ingredient, putting it on the flame and smoke and getting amazing flavours.
What role does family and community play in what you do?
Tim: It is very much a family-based business. There’s myself and my wife, our children all help in the restaurant.
Tim: We’ve always had an open-door policy - when somebody comes to your house hungry, you welcome them in, you feed them, you look after them. My grandmother did it, and it’s what we’ve always done as a family. Going into the industry wasn’t really part of the plan, it just happened that way. But the act of sharing food has always been at the heart of who we are - it’s so fundamental.
Tim: When you eat at our restaurant, it’s like eating at our house, and at our house when you come for a meal it involves me cooking over fire for you - relaxed, informal, but a real evocative feeling… with a glass of wine or a dram of whisky and just enjoying yourself.
What makes Skye such a special place?
Tim: From a chef’s point of view we are very much blessed with access to a great larder of seafood, meat, eggs and vegetables from both around Skye and from around the Highlands as well.
Ru: I’m really lucky to be on Skye. It’s a beautiful place. Other than the midgies. And yeah, I’ve been here 20 years. I think I’ve seen most of it but it’s always showing you something new. It’s never the same year on. It always changes. It’s always evolving.
Blair: It’s just a brilliant place to grow up and have that lifestyle and be free and grow our own food and everything obviously tastes a whole lot better because it’s freshly picked every morning.
Tim: Sustainability has been at the heart of the whole ethos and driving force behind what we wanted to achieve with The Dunvegan.
How does “Smoke with Taste” resonate with your cooking?
Tim: We’re super passionate about cooking over fire. Our tasting menu explores the many ways fire can be used in cooking, each technique is designed to bring out the natural flavours of the ingredients.
Tim: It's a really ancient way of coming together and the reason that it works so well in a restaurant, is it’s one of those real basic feelings of sitting around a campfire with a smoke wafting over and eating and sharing food.
Ru: You have to be really careful not to overload the dishes with smoke, though. You need to have it controlled and use only enough where you need it. You don’t want to go crazy. It’s important to keep it under control.
Tell us about a dish that pairs well with Torabhaig.
Tim: When we came across Torabhaig, the thing that struck me was the smoke, the brine, and a touch of salinity - all of which felt, even on paper, like a perfect match.
Tim: One of our key dishes at the moment are some locally supplied mussels, where we’ve created a whisky, cream and garlic sauce that matches perfectly to the salty brineness that comes from the mussels. Those mussels are cooked over fire and smoke, giving them further depth of flavour and with the whisky. It’s a perfect match for us.
And a dish that really captures Skye itself?
Tim: I think one of my favourite dishes at the moment that involves cooking over fire and lots of smoke, would be our lamb rack dish. It really invokes the place of Skye - the lamb, the heather, and the smoke combined together, create a great dish.
Blair: The lamb rack is probably one of my favourites too. We’ve got the heather growing on the hill and having that in combination with the lamb and the smoke… that just feels like Skye.
Ru: We also ember-cook celeriac in the embers overnight and then that’s made into a sauce for the dish. Then the lamb is smoked with the heather on the fire, and we put the heather onto the plate as well and smoke it up just before it goes out. As the plate is going into the restaurant you get the smoke and the smell of it travelling around everywhere. Then right to the end when you're serving the dish, have it with a dram of Torabhaig. It's brilliant.
Whether over open fire or in the glass, The Dunvegan treats smoke the same way we do - with balance, patience, and a deep sense of place. It’s there to lift the flavour, not overwhelm it. To bring people together.
Feeling hungry?
Why not try The Dunvegan's renowned mussel dish at home? Scroll down for the full recipe. Or, experience The Dunvegan’s menu for yourself - together with dram of Sound of Sleat - on your next visit to Skye. Visit their website for more info here, or follow them on Instagram @thedunveganskye.
