Woodland to Table: How Foraging Became Edinburgh's Food Culture
Updated: Sep 29
AI illustration for the4pegs.com, in our So Scottish palette.
Last Saturday I went to the hottest ticket in town. Not a festival show, not a stadium gig — a fungi forage. Valvona & Crolla's legendary Fungi Foray sells out every single year, and there we all were at half seven in the morning, coffee and pastry in hand at 19 Elm Row, baskets at the ready, waiting for a coach to a top-secret wood. It was one of the most charming mornings out I've had in years — and a window into something much bigger. Foraged food isn't a trend here. It's the root system under Edinburgh's whole food culture.
The Foray: A Very Scottish Morning Out
Coffee first, coach second, mushrooms third — the Valvona & Crolla way.
The Contini family — the dynasty behind Scotland's great Italian deli — team up with leading mycologist Neville Kilkenny for one day each autumn. The itinerary tells you everything about the spirit of it: a coffee and pastry in the Caffè Bar, a coach ride to a location kept secret, a good few hours walking the woods, then a V&C packed lunch with a glass of wine while Nev identifies your finds and talks you through the pleasures and perils of cooking with wild mushrooms. £90 a ticket, gone months in advance. Bring a basket, wear stout shoes, and leave with a new way of seeing the woodland floor.
From this year's Foray: one of my finds, ready for the identification table. Photo: Sharon McMenemy Khan.
Learn It Yourself: Judith's Walks
One of the best-known guides in the city will teach you what's safe and what's not.
The Fungi Foray might be the hottest ticket, but foraging around Edinburgh is a year-round habit, and Judith Lamb of Edinburgh Forage & Eat is one of the people who keeps it alive — German-born, hugely knowledgeable, and generous with both. Her guided walks and courses run through the seasons, and I've done one myself: small groups, real expertise, and that same quiet pleasure in knowing exactly what's growing under the hedge. Check her Facebook page for upcoming walks.
And once you start noticing what grows where, a walk like Corstorphine Hill tells the whole story in one afternoon. Start in the walled garden, where you can see exactly what people are growing — and get a proper feel for what does and doesn't grow in Scotland through the seasons. Then head out onto the wild, uncurated part of the hill, where no one plans anything and nature simply allows things to grow wherever the space lets them. It's a lovely contrast: gardening for food on one side of the wall, foraging for food on the other. The hill is also one leg of the John Muir Way, the coast-to-coast route named for the father of national parks, so you can follow the signs through Edinburgh with your eyes on the hedgerows. A really nice tour, and one I'd recommend to anyone who wants to understand what Scotland's larder actually looks like.
Corstorphine Hill in its autumn colours — walled garden below, wild hill above. Photo: Sharon McMenemy Khan.
A Culture, Not an Industry
What struck me most on Saturday is that this isn't really an industry at all — it's a culture. It runs all the way through Edinburgh's food world, top to bottom: the environmentalists who care about the woods, the chefs who cook what the woods provide, the small foodie places, the great chefs with their own rooms, the restaurants with rooms above them. It's less knowledge-transfer, more a shared way of thinking — that the best ingredients are ones somebody actually walked out and found. You feel it at every level of the city's cooking, and it's one of the quietly wonderful things about eating here.
The day's haul — a whole basket of different species, colours and shapes. Photo: Sharon McMenemy Khan.
Where the Woods Meet the Menu: Timberyard and Montrose
A Michelin-starred kitchen that works with foragers — and a neighbourhood wine bar with a secret weapon: the cider list.
Nowhere shows the culture better than the Radford family's two venues. Timberyard, opened by Andrew and Lisa Radford in 2012 and now led by Ben, Jo and Abi, took a Michelin star in 2023 and a Michelin Green Star in 2026 — and it works the way this whole piece works: closely with local growers, foragers and artisan producers, serving only wild meat, letting Scotland's natural larder set the menu.
Its sister venue, Montrose, on Montrose Terrace in one of Edinburgh's first-ever public houses, presents as a neighbourhood wine bar — but don't let that fool you. The cider list is the quiet star: small-batch, hard-to-find ciders with a direct line back to the apple and to foraging. And the building wears its history on the outside: look up before you go in and you'll see a stag with a cross carved into the pediment — the same iconography as the old legend of King David I and the white hart, the crowned stag said to have led the king to the spot where Holyrood Abbey was founded. A thousand years of Scottish woodland lore, sitting above the door of a wine bar.
Montrose Terrace in its autumn colours. Photo: Sharon McMenemy Khan.
The stag and the cross, carved above the door — the King David and the white hart legend, hiding in plain sight. Photo: Sharon McMenemy Khan.
On Sunday 4 October, that connection gets its own day: Anders Heindorff of Flor Deli, from Svaneke on the Danish Baltic island of Bornholm, brings a one-day pop-up to Montrose. Anders makes wild ciders from Bornholm's own orchards and hedgerows, and the day builds around them. It's about as niche and lovely as a food event gets: a Baltic island's foraged cider tradition, landing for one day only in a former Edinburgh pub. The shape of the day:
A reduced lunch menu, made in collaboration with the Montrose kitchen, from midday until half past two
Snacks through the afternoon, Flor Deli style
Dinner from five (last orders before nine): larder preserves, pâté en croûte, terrines and other Flor Deli specialities alongside Montrose's own classics
Why the Woods Matter
All of this — the forays, the walks, the menus — stands on something fragile: the woods themselves. Fungi only thrive where woodland is old, varied and undisturbed, and the people who forage know that better than anyone. You can't love this food culture without wanting to protect the places it comes from, which is why preserving natural woodland is one of the most important ideas in Edinburgh right now. The fungi forage sells out every year for a reason: people want to be in the wood, not just eat what came out of it. Look after the woods, and the larder looks after itself.
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