The riverside restaurant with exciting Scottish chef at the helm that's opening for summer

There’s something unique coming to the area

I was introduced to Orry Shand’s cooking back in late spring.

He was doing a pop-up one-night-only dinner at his old workplace, Edinburgh’s luxurious Number One at The Balmoral restaurant.

Shand came out to introduce a couple of the dishes on the seven-course menu. The most memorable of these were the velvety BBQ Pittenweem lobster with baba ganoush and vadouvan sauce, and the sea trout mi-cuit with ponzu and datterini tomatoes. My dinner was utterly dreamy and unforgettable.

Fast forward a couple of months, and he’s on the cusp of opening his first restaurant, Falls, in Aberdeenshire. The opening date is July 15, and his kitchen has just been installed.

You might not think that the location of Bridge of Feugh, where you can famously watch salmon flipping in the Falls of Feugh, is a particularly exciting foodie destination.

However, Shand is going to change that. Their reservations opened in April for this venue, which was once the Falls of Feugh Restaurant, and they’re already 80 per cent full until September. Apparently, diners will be travelling from as far as Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, fuelled in part as you'd imagine by Shand’s telly appearance and banquet win on Great British Menu 2026 and his National Chef of the Year 2025 award. The hype is at fever pitch.

At his new restaurant, there will be a seating capacity of just 30, with two sittings available each evening from Wednesday to Saturday. They’ll be offering a “relaxed fine dining” dinner, which consists of a set tasting menu of 12 to 15 courses, or “servings”, as the website stresses, presumably for those who might feel intimidated by that amount of food.

Most unusually, there will be no menu presented on the night, so, unlike the salmon, you will have to go with the flow.

Not everyone is a fan of this eating style, but it suited Shand’s vision.

“For me personally, and this is maybe a cheffy thing, but I prefer zero choice,” he says. “I also think, where we are, it's like a bit of a destination restaurant, so you're going to have an enjoyable evening, you're not popping in for an hour to have a main course and a dessert and go home. It’s not like in a big city, where you've got so much choice, then you need to be competitive with offering a lot of different things”.

The menu is under wraps, but it will have Nordic influence, as Shand was inspired by foodie trips abroad, including a visit to three Michelin star restaurant Maaemo in Oslo.

“That changed my mindset slightly,” he says. “I just like the pureness of Nordic cooking”.

Also, Falls will showcase the chef’s French techniques that he honed while working under the late Fairlie at Gleneagles’ Restaurant Andrew Fairlie and Number One at The Balmoral, as well as Scottish produce.

“We're going to have a lobster dish on the menu that is very similar to the scallop dish that I did on Great British Menu. So that one is a really exciting dish, and we're getting creel caught Scottish lobster just off the Aberdeen harbour,” he says.

Although he’s a fan of what they’re doing at places like two-Michelin-starred Crieff restaurant The Glenturret Lalique, where his former Number One at The Balmoral colleague Mark Donald works, Shand isn’t thinking about a Michelin star. Yet.

“I just want a full restaurant and happy customers,” he says. “Whatever awards come our way will come our way if we're good enough, but it's not something that’s on the radar”.

His newly assembled team at Falls includes head chef Craig Palmer, formerly of Number One at The Balmoral, and there’s general manager Bonita Robbins, who came from Elements in Glasgow and Lila in Edinburgh.

“We've got a couple of strong people in, and then we've got a lot of local staff that we've employed as well, which is good for the area,” he says.

Now that there are just 11 sleeps to go, is Shand, who is originally from Ellon, feeling nervous or excited?

“Probably a bit of both, but because this refurb has been happening for six months, I’m ready for it to be over the line now,” he says.

He has not enjoyed the amount of admin involved in setting up a restaurant, and the process has reaffirmed to him that he could never do an office job.

However, the amount of advance bookings has justified Shand’s decision to choose that location in Royal Deeside, which he says is quite an affluent area.

“It was just like a really nice site that we fell in love with after we visited it, and I thought, yeah, this is the one,” he says.

Those who’ve visited the Falls of Feugh Restaurant before won’t recognise the property on their next visit.

“It’s been stripped out, with basically new electrics, new plumbing, and reconfiguration. We've got an open kitchen now, and we've taken down some structural walls, so it'll probably be very unrecognisable,” says Shand. “That's no criticism of the former restaurant, but it'll just be very different”.

Shand’s whole family has been pitching in, with his dad doing a bit of painting. His wife and two daughters are really “excited” about the new business.

The finished space will feature limewash walls, and lots of natural materials, like wood and stone. It sounds beautiful.

That isn’t a bad result for someone who was told they wouldn’t last two weeks in their first hospitality job, aged 14-years-old. Shand doesn’t want me to name the site of this put-down, as it’s under new ownership now anyway.

However, as he says; “That was quite a negative thing to say, but sometimes it makes you chuckle, because then you know, I guess you prove people wrong, don’t you?”

www.fallsbyos.com