Sharon Jack

Crieff has always been a food town. The cattle drovers who converged on this place for centuries, the bakery family that has been on the High Street since 1830, the distillery that has been making whisky since 1763. The food culture here did not start this week. But this week it gets a proper stage. The Crieff Food & Drink Festival runs from 10th to 18th October. Nine days of events across the town - masterclasses, tastings, competitions, dining experiences and a Scottish Artisan Market that...

The food scene in a town is only ever as good as the people who show up to build it. The chefs, the producers, the bakers, the people who look at an empty shop or a family farm or a vacant bistro and decide that this is the place where they want to make something. Crieff has been attracting those people for a while now. We asked four of them about their backgrounds, what brought them here and what they think of the place they chose. Mark Bush, Summer Harvest Mark and his partner Maggie...

There’s a restaurant just a few minutes from Crieff town centre that holds two Michelin stars. It sits inside Scotland's oldest working distillery, beside the River Turret. The food is extraordinary. And the story of how it got there is just as exciting. Where it started Mark Donald grew up in Glasgow. As a teenager he took a job washing dishes in a pub kitchen in Milngavie. Not because he had ambitions to become a chef. He wanted to be an actor, and the kitchen paid. What happened next was...