Phil Carnegie
Phil Carnegie
Phillip Carnegie comes from a family of chefs - his brother worked in kitchens and his mother prepared food for a nursing home in a village near Alford, where he grew up.
When Phil Carnegie was seventeen, Stephen Taylor offered him a traineeship at Aberdeen’s Shelly Leigh’s Restaurant. So he moved up north, eventually taking jobs at the Waterwheel Inn, the Lairhillock Inn and ultimately Germany’s prestigious Villa Hammerschimede.
More recently, the Ben Nevis foothills and imposing Inverlochy Castle – one of Queen Victoria’s favourite holiday haunts – provided the backdrop for Phil’s cooking. Originally a sous chef, he took over the kitchen from Matthew Grey in 2009. Phil promptly won a Michelin star of his own, maintaining on his own terms an honour that the restaurant held for decades. He left Inverlochy Castle in 2015, joining The Inch Hotel in Fort Augustus, where ninety percent of the produce on the menu came from Scotland, until 2021. Then, he became head chef at Crannog Concepts.
It goes without saying that as a Michelin-starred chef, Phil has always made superb use of the ingredients immediately around him that he finds most appealing; Scottish game and seafood feature prominently on his menus. It doesn’t hurt that his father works closely with Scottish fish merchants, so he always knows where to get the freshest, most delectable fish in the area.
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