Eat My family
I’m Roddy Nicoll, and I’ve spent a lifetime feeding people — and most of a lifetime working out why.
I’m Scottish: grandson of the woman who actually taught me to cook, son of a performer still going strong in his nineties and a mother who was once Miss Scotland. I learned early that a kitchen is a stage, and I’ve been playing it ever since — through nightclubs and catering halls and restaurant kitchens, as a chef, a charcutier, and these days the founder of Spirits of Virtue, home of Glen Dochus.
I’ve been married three times. One of those wives is now one of my closest friends — she was the best man at my third wedding, which tells you most of what you need to know about how I do things. Along the way I’ve gathered a sprawl of children: some who arrived the usual way, one who came as part of the deal and chose my name for himself, one who found me after years I’d spent quietly hoping she would. My brother Kerr keeps me honest, and keeps the business standing.
Eat My Family is the result of all of it — a life told in meals, and the people who turned out to be the actual point of them. I still can’t sit at a table without trying to feed everyone at it. I’ve long since stopped apologising for that.
Pull up a chair.
