The Best Seafood Near Cardinal, by the Record

Champagne trolley upstairs, ageing fridges stocked with charcuterie and top-end seafood, then down to grey velvet and white linen for the tasting menu, which is Stuart Ralston's idea of unapologetic fine dining and he means it. The 28-seat room holds a Michelin star and a spot on the National Restaurant Awards list, and the kitchen leans heavily into sustainably caught fish and shellfish, letting the produce do most of the arguing.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. National Restaurant Awards 2026 · #33 · The National Restaurant Awards

A wine bar downstairs, a seafood restaurant upstairs, and Scottish waters doing most of the heavy lifting on the menu. Shetland mussels and Skye langoustines anchor things, though the kitchen isn't above pulling in Jamaican jerk spice or harissa butter when the mood strikes. The West End crowd tends to start with a glass from the international list and somehow never quite makes it to the stairs.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Sea trout pastrami is the dish that tells you what kind of place this is: a seafood restaurant on Leith's Shore that lets the fish do the talking without much theatrical interference. The menu moves from shareable small plates at lunch to proper sit-down plates come evening, whole sole, half lobster, and the like. The room has the easy warmth of a place where the staff seem to mean it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A converted pub on the St Monans harbour front, where most tables look straight out over the water and a small terrace catches the summer light off the Firth of Forth. The cooking is modern and composed, the kind that leans on whatever the East Neuk coastline drops off nearby. A fixed-price lunch menu and an evening tasting menu keep things focused, which suits the room's quiet, unhurried pace just fine.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Paintings of the sea cover the walls at this small seafood bistro opposite Pittenweem harbour, which doubles as a gallery for local artists, so you might leave with dinner and a framed print. The blackboard lists what came in that day, langoustines and hake among the regulars, all built around East Neuk produce cooked without fuss. It has the feel of a place the village keeps quietly to itself.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Haar sits at the edge of St Andrews with a Nordic-leaning seafood menu that keeps Arbroath smokies and smoked lobster in the conversation. The format runs from a fixed-price lunch to an evening tasting menu, and the kitchen's instinct is Scottish produce filtered through a wider, well-traveled palate. The team also run a cocktail bar and seafood shack nearby, which is handy when St Andrews fills up, as it tends to.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Views over West Sands beach set the tone for this seafood restaurant inside the restored Seaton House hotel in St Andrews. The kitchen leans classic, letting crab, lobster, and sole from nearby East Neuk fishing villages do the talking rather than burying them in technique. It made its name in Edinburgh over many years before the move coastwards, which in hindsight seems obvious: the seafood was always pointing in this direction.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant