Chef Mark Greenaway Showcases Scotland’s Bounty Without Conforming to Clichés

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1580065" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/Chef-Mark-Greenaway.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="" width="970" height="647" data-caption='Chef Mark Greenaway. <span class=”media-credit”>Courtesy L. Piljar</span>’>

Mark Greenaway got his first kitchen job when he was 15 years old. He had thumbed through the local phonebook in his hometown of Lanark, Scotland, looking for hotels and restaurants that might be hiring a chef. After calling all of them, the Cartland Bridge Hotel hired him as a KP, which Greenaway assumed was an apprentice. He showed up to his first day of work in full chef whites and a tall chef hat. He spent the entire shift washing dishes. 

“I said, ‘Chef, I’ve not cooked anything,’” Greenaway tells Observer, speaking from The Caledonian Edinburgh on a late summer day. “And he said, ‘Well, yeah, you’re a KP.’ It turned out KP stood for ‘kitchen porter.’ I stood the whole day in my chef whites with my tall white hat, washing dishes. But he said, ‘Okay, come back tomorrow. Wear your whites. Get rid of the hat and you can start as a chef.’”

Today, Greenaway is one of Scotland’s most notable chefs, with a multi-decade career that has included stints in Scotland, England and Australia. But he initially looked for a restaurant job simply because he thought it would be an easy way to make money. “I thought: How hard can it be?” he says, laughing at the memory. “I enjoyed cooking at home and assumed, ‘Well, you’ve got all day to prepare. It can’t be that hard.’” 

That first day in the kitchen was an eye-opener, not just because Greenaway had shown up in full chef whites. It was also his first time in an actual restaurant. Growing up in Renfrew until he was 10 and then in Lanark, he had never eaten outside the home or even really cooked with his family. “It’s not how I was brought up,” he says. “So in my life, I’ve never eaten in a restaurant like a normal customer. And now I always eat in a restaurant for a reason. But because I had never eaten in a restaurant, I genuinely had no idea what being a chef was.”

Greenaway splits his time between three restaurants. He lives in England’s Lake District, where Mark Greenaway at the Haweswater Hotel is located, and regularly stays in Edinburgh to oversee The Court at the historic The Caledonian Edinburgh, which recently transitioned from a Waldorf Astoria to part of Hilton’s Curio Collection. In London, Greenaway helms Pivot British Bar & Bistro. 

Greenaway began his relationship with The Caledonian Edinburgh in 2019, when he debuted Grazing by Mark Greenaway shortly after closing his namesake eatery, Restaurant Mark Greenaway. In The Court, he currently showcases a six-course tasting experience called the “Progression Menu,” which shares its name with his recent cookbook, Progression. 

“We want to showcase the incredible produce we have in Scotland,” he says of the £65-per-person menu. “Of course, we also want to showcase the skills within the kitchen, but in a way that is sympathetic to those ingredients. The beauty of a tasting menu is that you might try things you wouldn’t normally. Some people like to be safe. Some people like to be adventurous. It’s about having a mixture of safety, adventure and good produce.”

Greenaway and his team use as many Scottish ingredients as possible. All of the seafood, as well as the beef, the chicken and the lamb, are sourced locally. More than 80 percent of the vegetables come from within 10 miles, as does the honey. The menu, which is also available as an à la carte option, evolves seasonally, usually changing every six weeks. Some popular dishes, like Greenaway’s famous sticky toffee pudding soufflé, remain. Nothing conforms to clichés about Scottish cuisine, which is sometimes assumed to be stodgy or boring. 

“I called my first cookbook Perceptions because I wanted to try and change the perception of Scottish food in my own little way from my own little restaurant,” he says. “Scotland had a reputation, but we grow some of the best soft berries in the world, the best shellfish, the best Angus beef. We’ve got some of the best lamb. People assume that because we send so much to England, we don’t know how to cook it, and we all live on a diet of haggis and deep-fried Mars bars. That’s simply not true.”

Although Perceptions came out in 2016, Greenaway says some of the presumptions have lingered. “I think the perception is still there and it’s something that we’re always going to have to change,” he says. Greenaway also doesn’t shy away from Scottish classics, like haggis. (For those unfamiliar with the Scottish dish: It’s made from sheep’s offal, mixed with oats, suet, onion and spices.) Although it wasn’t on the menu when I visited, he has previously showcased a Roscoff onion dish that incorporates haggis and a whiskey jus for a modern take on haggis, neeps and tatties. 

“There will always be a Scottish twist to what I do because it’s what I know,” he says. “I’m Scottish. My first restaurant was in Scotland. My ingredients are often Scottish. But what does it have to be to be considered Scottish food? It’s a big question. It’s not all about bagpipes and tartan—there’s far more to us than that.”

Greenaway’s approach to his constantly changing menus goes back to his early years working at Auchterarder House in Scotland. Although he had gotten his start in savory cooking, Greenaway accepted a short-term gig as the pastry chef. “The head chef said to me, ‘You’re not allowed to repeat anything—not a garnish, not a flavor, nothing,’” he recalls. “Every single month, I had to create a new dessert menu from scratch. He was really strict with it.” 

That structure pushed Greenaway to get more creative. He estimates that he’s created several thousand dishes over the course of his career, both savory and dessert. “It’s always a continuous challenge,” he says. “I’m always probably working on three or four dishes at any given time. Maybe they’re rattling around my head, or a note on my computer, or an email to someone or a text message. But I think as a chef, you like to challenge yourself.”

For a long time, Greenaway felt he had something to demonstrate in the kitchen, especially when working for other chefs. “Nobody asked me to prove it,” he says. “I always felt like I had to.” Now, though, he feels confident in his success, even if he’s still always striving to improve. 

“You can always be better as a chef,” he acknowledges. “It’s not like accountancy, where it’s straightforward. You’re only ever limited by your own creativity. It’s one of the very few jobs where you can express that. An accountant can’t just decide, ‘I’m going to add the numbers up differently today. Let’s see what happens.’ We can do that with ingredients. We turn them into what it’s going to be.”

Progression, released last summer in the U.K., exemplifies Greenaway’s constant desire for progress. It’s a grand tome of a cookbook, with artful imagery of each dish. He never intended to write a second book, but says “madness” drove him to undergo the process again. “I felt I had more stories to tell,” he notes. “And more recipes to share. And as soon as you bring out a cookbook, it’s old, because those dishes have been done. There are dishes on my menu now that are not even in my second cookbook.” 

These days, Greenaway defines success as being able to pass along his years of knowledge. He’s often approached about opening more restaurants or doing events around the world, but he prefers to keep his focus on his current work so he can train younger chefs. “Success for me is having a happy team and a busy restaurant that’s continuously busy,” he says. And despite picking his career path based on a misconception that it would be simple, he remains grateful to be part of the industry every day. 

“It took me a few months in a kitchen before I realized this was it,” he says. “It’s not that I started finding it easy—there is nothing easy about being a chef—but I became better at it. You get quicker, your thinking changes, you burn things less, and it helps you want to stay. It was only six months into a 30-year career before I realized I didn’t want to do anything else. And I still don’t.”