The story
Station Road is the restaurant at The Lovat hotel in Inverness, where the Scottish kitchen earned three AA Rosettes for Culinary Excellence in 2026. The restaurant sits in an elegant hotel on the shore of Loch Ness, and its menu follows the seasons closely.
Chef Sean Kelly's career has taken him through kitchens in Paris, Corsica and Italy before Station Road, according to The Good Food Guide, which rates the restaurant Very Good for 2026. The cooking is ambitious and technical, but the menu stays tied to place. The team forages hedgerows, woodland and the loch's edge, gathering wild garlic in spring and nettles along the water. The kitchen garden supplies heritage vegetables, culinary herbs and soft fruit.
The beremeal and treacle bannock arrives at the table with its own small show: a handful of grain and a mini mill used to grind the bere, an ancient Orkney barley. The bread is cooked in a skillet and served warm with sea-salted butter and a pesto made with kitchen garden herbs. Amuse-bouches are small and precise, such as a chicken liver parfait tart with damson jelly, or an Arbroath smokie mousse topped with white lardo. Dessert might be a raspberry "cheesecake" with a green chocolate casing, tart sorbet and a raspberry leaf.
The dining room is described as intimate yet spacious, with whimsical décor and attentive service. The Good Food Guide describes a colourful, contemporary room, and the wine and whisky list is chosen as much for its stories as for pairing with food.
Recognition
Ambience
Details
History
Chef Sean Kelly’s journey has taken him from top-rated venues in Paris via Corsica and Italy to this colourful, contemporary restaurant housed in an elegant hotel by the shores of Loch Ness. Visitors to Station Road are treated to an ‘interactive and immersive’ dining experience that is big on ambition, technique and culinary wow factor but never feels gimmicky – even if it is leavened with stories and nuggets of info on provenance. The tableside tale around the 'beremeal and treacle bannock' bread course even comes with its own props, including a handful of grain and the mini mill used to grind the bere (an ancient Orkney barley). The bannock itself is cooked in a skillet and served warm with a quenelle of sea-salted butter and dish of earthy pesto made with herbs from the kitchen garden. Everything feels fine-tuned here, and the amuse-bouches are bitesize works of art – a tiny tart of chicken liver parfait topped with damson jelly alongside a ball of Arbroath smokie mousse crowned with a salty sliver of white lardo, for example. Dishes such as home-grown potatoes with a free-range egg and locally foraged mushrooms are intricate reimaginings of humble ingredients, the egg wrapped in a crunchy latticework of Shetland Black potato in a soupy sea of fungal foam sprinkled with nasturtium leaves. Elsewhere, a pairing of wild halibut, Shetland mussels, crab cannelloni, courgette and sea fennel is exquisitely pretty, the black-and-white striped cannelloni like a giant mint humbug. At the sweet end of the menu, you might be offered a 'cheesecake' of Perthshire raspberries involving a raspberry mousse sprayed with a green chocolate casing, topped with fresh raspberries, tart sorbet and a raspberry leaf. It looks – and tastes – simply gorgeous. Finally, a warm madeleine on a bed of spruce sugar is a bit like the Auld Alliance on a plate, while wines, whiskies and other drinks are chosen for their stories and ethos as much as their food-pairing potential.
3 Rosette Award for Culinary Excellence
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