The Seed Store Restaurant
About your chef, Sam Ritchie
Returning to The Seed Store, after a smash hit first season, Sam is a chef with over 20 years experience cooking in restaurants and hotels across Aberdeenshire and beyond. Perhaps most notable of all is his recent four-and-a-half year stint at the superb Fife Arms which garnered international praise, alongside a spell at the Ninth in London (Michelin star) under Jun Tanaka.
For the past two years Sam has delved into a new adventure in single malt whisky at Banchory’s Burnobennie Distillery.
This year’s Seed Store menu was designed by Sam and Caroline, reflecting their joint passion for seasonal, local ingredients and cooking over wood fires. The pair will come together on the final night (6th September) to cook the menu for a handful of lucky guests.
About the Seed Store
You may know that The Saw Mill and Seed Store was one of our first holiday properties at Glen Dye. We lovingly and painstakingly renovated it in 2018, decades after it had been allowed to collapse into ruin.
Then, during that grim series of named storms during late 2023 and early 2024, when gale after gale and downpour after downpour thrashed and lashed and wrecked and ruined, The Saw Mill suffered some pretty nasty damage which led us not to despair but to search for, and find, some silver linings in those grumpy, rain-soaked clouds. We decided to open The Saw Mill to all of our guests.
We’ve been aware for some time that many of you are looking for things to do when you stay with us that don’t take you far away from your house. We’ve been mulling this for some time and this is what we decided.
So, and in response to endless requests, we have launched a small, simple and high-end restaurant at The Saw Mill, called The Seed Store (because it will be housed in The Seed Store). When we say ‘high-end’ we mean in a contemporary way, so very relaxed and low-key but also small and detail-driven as well as super-focused on excellent seasonal ingredients from Glen Dye, cooked over fire.
Glen Dye really does offer up an extraordinary array of ingredients and we’ll develop various seasonal menus that make the best of these. We have some outstanding Scottish chefs who will be cooking, and the opening weekend in 2024 featured the legendary Romy Gill MBE.
The restaurant will be open occasionally and our residential guests will always have first dibs on booking. This isn’t our first restaurant venture: we have two at Hawarden in Wales and for many years, Caroline worked with the late, fabled chef Bill Granger, so we feel confident enough to give it a go.
