Graeme Cheevers has just opened Loma at Cameron House. The chef proprietor, who over the course of his career has earned three Michelin stars, is happy to have opened back at his former stomping ground. Susan Young caught up with him at the new restaurant to find out more.
Graeme Cheevers is a man on a mission – to craft exceptional food using the finest ingredients.
His passion began as a youngster, when he grew his first potato, and while other kids spent their pocket money on crisps, Graeme was popping into Morrisons to buy asparagus, driven by pure curiosity about how it might taste. Then his dad coerced him into caddying for him over the summer, a role he didn’t enjoy.
He recounts the story, “My dad played golf, and I used to go down there after school and at weekends and carry his golf clubs but I hated it, so I used to go exploring the woods and would find mushrooms and suchlike. I then found myself in the kitchen cooking bacon rolls for the golfers and it grew from there. Then I got to a crossroads. I thought if I am going to do this, I am going to do it properly, and that’s when I went to college.”
However, Graeme’s experience with formal culinary education was, by his own admission, disappointing. “My experience of college wasn’t as expected,” he says bluntly. “People who did the course I did, did it because it was an easy course and they got a bursary. I also did it because it meant I didn’t have to do any exams at school.”
He lasted about a year and failed his college exams through boredom rather than inability. “I am not particularly academic, but I liked the cooking side, but we were doing the same thing all the time – brown lamb stew every second day. I had mine done in half an hour and had to wait two hours for everyone else to catch up.”
This frustration with mediocrity would prove defining. Graeme saw his classmates as content with average, something that clashed fundamentally with his ambitions.
“I think the education sector was a bit stuck. The people I was at college with generally ended up out of the industry. Only a few continued as chefs and they went mainstream. I didn’t want to go this route, I didn’t want to be average.”
Instead, he would go to college during the day and every evening he worked at The Buttery. He says, “From Monday–Friday I was getting up at 6 a.m. and getting the bus to Glasgow. I went to college until 4 p.m. then walked from Cathedral Street to The Buttery. I worked there until 11 p.m. at night and then got the bus home.”
He did that five nights a week and worked all weekend. That hard working youngster is today one of Scotland’s star chefs. Graeme is one of the very few who has gained a Michelin-star for three of the venues he has catered for. He gained the first in his early 20s while working for Martin Wishart at Loch Lomond, followed by his second at Isle of Eriska in 2019, and his third was awarded to Unalome, the restaurant that he opened in Glasgow with business partner Michael Payne in 2021.
He gained his Michelin star for the restaurant eight months later. And now he has a clear objective at Loma at Cameron House – to gain his fourth within the year.
As well as having a new opening under his belt, he also has a new baby on the way with wife Cristina, who herself comes from a hospitality family – the Crollas, who own Oro in Glasgow’s Southside. The two met as he was getting set to open Unalome, and now Cristina works with Graeme on the reservation and hosting side of the business. Says Cristina, “My grandparents and parents worked together and it feels natural to be working alongside Graeme. It is a dream come true.”
Graeme admits the most financially successful restaurants in Scotland are Italian, but he points out it’s easier to make money when your ingredients are less expensive, but his passion is for creating dishes with the best ingredients available and that comes at a price.
His latest venture, the new restaurant at Cameron House, now called Loma, is where he started his Michelin quest while working for Martin Wishart, and says Graeme, “It’s nice to be back and it is a nice place to work. It’s a great space, with one of the best views in Scotland, and I know everyone around the hotel, so it has been quite easy.”
This familiarity stems from his deep roots in the area; he comes from Bishopton, and it is where his culinary journey first took serious shape under Martin Wishart’s tutelage. After college, he initially went to work for Geoffrey Smeddle at Etain and then after 18 months decided to broaden his horizons and try weddings and functions, just in case he preferred that side of the business.
Says Graeme, “I took a 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. job which was very well paid and we did house parties and weddings. I earned about a lot of money. But I got bored.” He then went to work for Martin Wishart at Loch Lomond. Graeme explains, “I took a big pay cut to go there but I didn’t care because for me that was my education.”
This willingness to sacrifice financial security for knowledge would become a recurring theme, testament to his belief that true expertise cannot be bought, only earned through dedication.”
He continues, “Martin obviously saw something in me, although he started me on pastry, which was a big demotion from what I had been doing before, but he kept coming in and looking at me.”
After six weeks, Martin asked simply: “What’s your ambition?” Graeme’s response was equally direct: “By the time I’m 30 I want to be running a restaurant like this and get a Michelin star.”
A few weeks later, Martin took him aside to tell him that the head chef, was leaving, but timing was critical – the Michelin Guide was due in October, and the restaurant had given itself three years to earn a star and he wanted Graeme to step up to Head Chef. And although Graeme was initially reluctant, he got an ultimatum. So Graeme embraced the opportunity and gave it his all.
This gesture of integrity paid dividends. Not only did they retain their Michelin star, but after four years “busting his ass,” Graeme began developing his own culinary voice within Martin’s established framework.
Says Graeme, “After a while I said to him that I didn’t want to just be replicating what he did in Edinburgh. I wanted to do something different here. We had similar styles, but I had a different technique – and liked to use different ingredients. His style was classically French and while I enjoy eating some of the rich sauces, I get bored with these dishes quite easily.”
This partnership created something unique in Scottish dining. Before Graeme’s intervention, there was little reason for diners to journey from Glasgow or Edinburgh to Loch Lomond, as the food was essentially the same as in the city. But with Graeme’s input and expertise, the menu evolved into something quite different.
He says with satisfaction, “They had a reason to come here, and it was not just for the view.” During the 10 years he spent with Martin Wishart, he continued his education, which included spending his holidays working abroad in other restaurants as an unpaid intern.
Graeme reveals, “In 2008 I went to London and worked in a few restaurants there and then I went to New York. But it was a completely different pace of life there and I didn’t really enjoy it. It was very regimented. You only worked 8 hours a day, but there was a very strict chef programme, and the route to becoming a chef was more regimented. Young chefs at college had to work in a 3-star restaurant for the whole summer – as a result, there were a lot of kids there who thought they knew what they were doing!”
“I really liked going to Holland and Belgium because their food was more aligned to what we are doing, but Singapore was my favourite place.”
After the Cameron House fire in 2017, he decided to take six months out – his first real break in a decade. When he put his chef whites back on, it was at the Isle of Eriska. He explains, “The opportunity at Isle of Eriska seemed perfect: a chance to build something from scratch and achieve my own Michelin star.”
Success at Isle of Eriska came quickly – the Michelin star arrived after 8 months. But the aftermath proved frustrating.
“Just when I felt I could start getting a day off, they wanted me to cut my team. I felt I had done a lot and gained a lot for them, but I didn’t feel I got the respect back.
“My experience there was the nudge I needed to go out on my own,” he reflects. But the timing also coincided with COVID and while he considered his next step, which was to open his own restaurant, he decided to try his hand at another job … packing books.
Graeme explains, “I got a bit bored, so I decided to get a job doing something completely different at publishers HarperCollins. I had only ever worked in a kitchen and I didn’t know anything other than that. But it was funny because the news was getting out that I was planning on opening a restaurant and it was in the newspapers and the guys were like, ‘Is that you?’”
He didn’t do it for long, but by the time he finished the concept of Unalome was born. Says Graeme, “I got in touch with my now business partner – Michael Payne, we both wanted to open a restaurant and we decided to do it together. I had known him for a long time and knew his team too.”
“During the rest of COVID they concentrated on building the restaurant in Glasgow. Says Graeme, “I wouldn’t have done it with anyone else. It has been six years since we started planning Unalome. Michael leaves me to run the business and he gets more involved with the detail of the design and the equipment. I wouldn’t be in business with anyone who was constantly analysing what I was doing, although it is good to get feedback and it is good to collaborate and talk about things.”
Unalome, opened just at the tail of COVID, when you could not drink inside but you could eat. It was special from the get-go and eight months later Graeme got his Michelin star for the restaurant. Despite the association of Michelin with fine dining, Graeme admits he hates the phrase “fine dining.”
“I hate the word ‘fine dining’ – fine fish and chips, it’s the same thing – good food, a nice restaurant, somewhere nice to go and eat.” He believes the term creates unnecessary barriers. “Fine dining almost alienates people – I think they think it will be pretentious or stuck up, but Unalome is quite casual.”
He also doesn’t bang on about buying local like most chefs. Instead, Graeme takes a more nuanced view. “We don’t make the most of the Scottish larder,” he admits, but his reasoning is pragmatic. “I use a lot of French vegetables and poultry – to me that is local, it is only a couple of thousand miles away. It is just across the water.”
He points out the absurdity of some “local” sourcing: “Some places that supply oysters send them to Essex to purify them. Sometimes it is better to buy them from down south, like Cornwall, where they are purified there – you use more carbon the other way.”
Quality and consistency trump geography in his sourcing decisions. “Consistency is very important here – my guests want something that is good – and I need consistency. It is not good enough to order 20 fillets of beef and when they are delivered 10 are good and 10 are average. I can’t have that when my guests are paying for it.”
This uncompromising approach to quality means he’s willing to source globally when necessary. “If I want a really good piece of beef, I will order from Japan.”
The situation with Scottish seafood is particularly frustrating for him. “Most of our shellfish goes to Europe – and they can get it fresher than we can here. I see them coming up and down this road every day. It’s frustrating, but I don’t think there is a strong enough market for them here anyway. People here don’t sit and eat langoustine on a Monday night. If you go to Spain or Italy, they would – it is just the culture.”
His menu philosophy reflects this same practical idealism. “I put on the menu things I like to eat – I don’t always like eating fancy food, so sometimes I will take something simple and elevate it. A bit of cod, but will try and make it special the way it is cooked and the way it However the authenticity question is one he navigates carefully.
“I like all sorts of food – I don’t put something on the menu where I know that it will not be quite what it is, not authentic. I would never put a proper Japanese dish because I know I couldn’t pull it off. I always stick within a certain limit – I know it is similar to how it should be, or it has a twist on what it should be like.”
The evolution of the industry during Graeme’s career has been dramatic, and not all of it positive in his view. While he acknowledges that improved working conditions and better pay are important advances, he worries about the impact on passion and dedication.
“It is easier than it has ever been because everyone now gets paid well, but I think this has been a bad thing for the industry. Now you get people who are in who are not that passionate about it. It has become a job, quite an easy job doing 40 hours a week.” This concern stems from his own experience of the old system, brutal though it was. “I used to do a 90-hour week and get paid for 40, which probably worked out at £2 an hour,” he recalls. “People were working 90 hours and getting paid for 45, but you didn’t care because you loved it. Now guys check out after 45 hours.”
The mathematics trouble him deeply. If young chefs today work half the hours he did, it will take twice as long to accumulate the same experience. “It has become too easy,” he argues. “When I was 21/22, you heard about places and read about them – but now people just see dishes on Instagram and think they can make them!”
The name of his new restaurant – Loma – means ‘peak of the hill’. Graeme says, “The hardest thing we have done is name the restaurant. I don’t fine that easy. But now that we are open I feel that it special here. I am happy that we are now settled and I can focus on getting a Michelin star this year.”
I asked him what was special about gaining a Michelin star. He explained, “What else can you use to justify or benchmark what level you are cooking at? Nothing else that gives you that satisfaction. No other guides are as straightforward and honest. You know you can flick through that little red book and you will find great restaurants. I need that target or goal. If I was working in a normal restaurant, I wouldn’t be motivated to get out of bed, and once you get a star, you have to work harder at keeping it.”
The young chef who once worked for Martin Wishart in these very surroundings, doing 90 hours a week, is now the master of his own kitchen. His Michelin star quest is set to continue. Despite having gained three over the years his ambition is to gain one for Loma too. I am not surprised. The journey from that frustrated college dropout to one of Scotland’s most celebrated chefs has been marked by an unwavering commitment to excellence and a refusal to accept anything less than the best.
As he settles into his new role, surrounded by familiar faces and landscapes that shaped his early career, Graeme Cheevers represents both the continuity of Scottish fine dining and its evolution. His story is one of passion triumphing over pragmatism, of quality over quantity, and of the belief that great food can transform not just a meal, but an entire dining culture.
With Loma, he has the opportunity to write the next chapter of that story, one perfectly crafted dish at a time.