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It’s been a spectacular autumn for the rowan, glaucous clusters of orange and scarlet berries bending the neatly round boughs. The rowan can find itself a bed in the most meagre of welcomes, clinging to the side of a waterfall, bent over a crack in the granite or swarming along the side of roads and the edges of lochs. I have never seen them as ruddily effulgent as they are this year. They, the toothless cackling hunchback soothsaying they, say a heavy crop of rowans presages a hard winter. All over northern Europe, the rowan is thought to be a magical tree. In England, you automatically call it a mountain ash, though it’s not related to the ash. It’s actually an aunt of the rose. It’s also called the wiccan tree. Or witchbane. The Finnish creation myth has the rowan being shagged by thunder to make the world. Rowans are a pathfinder species for the old Caledonian forest. Fast-growing, hardy, they’re found round prehistoric stone circles and tors, where they ward off evil. In Scotland, they’re placed in churchyards. You plant one outside your front door. Crosses, milk churns and witches’ wands are whittled from rowan. Highland women would wear necklaces of their berries strung on red thread. Sprigs were tied to the halters of horses and the tails of cattle at Beltane. Runes were carved in rowan. I particularly love rowan jelly. It has a deep and long bitterness. It is the taste of the country and the folk of the north. Best if it’s made with apple and eaten with venison.

I’ve been stalking the red deer. When we shoot them and their livers are checked, they’re taken away for a prewar pittance by a game dealer, who ships them to the continent. Scandinavians and Germans eat lots of venison. Here, we eat very little, but Scotland is overrun with wild deer. The national herd grows larger and smaller. More deer, but, individually, slighter. They need culling. They need eating, but chefs have a squeamish, timorous distaste for the stag. There’s a lot of received mouth-to-mouth kitchen nonsense talked about marinating for days, cooking for hours, barding and bonding, stuffing and stewing. If you do see venison on the menu, more than likely it’ll be a roe doe from a Hampshire farm. Cooks who put a premium on wild bass and salmon will go for the battery version of the wildest of all our native creatures. Chefs want venison that comes in small, neat cuts, to cook it like lamb. Then add a chestnut and a plum, then add a premium. Almost everything they tell you about red deer is the opposite of the truth. Middle-aged stag is particularly good, but it needs to be hung long, like beef, then roasted fast. Chefs need to get over their twee comfort and start looking at meat that isn’t a bland canvas for their decoration and twists.

I spent one night in Edinburgh on my way south. I drove down from Inverness and was starting again for London at three in the morning. I was starving. Emma, my hostess, suggested we go to the Kitchin, in Leith. This is the one widely reckoned restaurant in Edinburgh I haven’t been to before. Mostly because I couldn’t get a table. And because it’s in Leith. I have an old prejudice about Edinburgh’s docks. Like wharfs all over the country, Leith has been pomaded and neutered, its cobbles polished, its warehouses bijou’d. Old ports, the posterns and portals of gold and garbage, the warrens of violence and prostitution, drunkenness and darkness and slime, are now scrubbed up to look like born-again gangsters who give improving talks in schools and churches. Shorn of its purpose and edge, Leith has been toyed with by gay architects and designers to be transvestited into a funky modernity; the bones of industry and commerce, polished into objets and features. Seen through empty yards of slidy windows, there are acres of new restaurants. Not knowing what else to put here, they thought it might be the dining sector. Mexicans, pizza, Thai, Mexican-Thai, Mexican-Thai-pizza. On a drizzling September evening, the dining rooms were all empty, except for their piped music, which crept round the banquettes, looking for someone to annoy.

Then there was The Kitchin, glowing with bonhomie, replete with customers, heady with appetite. A human-sized, amiable room, functionally comfortable, with clever lighting. the kitchen here is Tom Kitchin. Not to be confused with Tom’s Kitchen, that is, Tom Aikens’s cafe in London. Scots Tom Kitchin is probably fed up with hearing that he was born to his calling. But he really was. Truly was. The menu I was given was an immediate, intense joy of unforced, ingredient-led innovation and common sense. I didn’t know where to start. And while I thought about it, I ordered roast bone marrow with snails, a longitudinally sawn shin, delicately baked, with the addition of fat snails, chanterelles and a parsley and onion salad. The snails poached with cardamom and star anise and fennel seeds and a dab of garlic sauce. I took a mouthful and knew that I couldn’t traverse life’s highlands with someone who didn’t love this dish more than they loved me. It just evoked those formless words that are an open sandwich of a consonant, followed by a long line of vowels.

Emma had a pig’s head. Obviously not personally, but on a plate. A pig’s head with langoustine. It came with a sort of rösti made out of crispy ears. Sweet, bottom-feeding crustacea have always gone well with pork, but this is the best, most inspired and craftsmanlike coming together of these unlikely soulmates. I ordered another starter, mackerel tartare, because I couldn’t bear leaving it out. Mackerel is such a divine fish when eaten fresh and line-caught, such a gagging disappointment after a few days, or netted. (Mackerel are strong, predatory swimmers; they thrash themselves to exhaustion. When caught by the gills, their muscle goes limp. This was simply the best a mackerel could hope to be. Served as a little tumulus in a palisade of cucumber, with the addition of earthy beetroot and an ethereal quail’s egg: clever, honest, every flavour pristine and harmonious. Then I had a blue hare. The Scots mountain hare is smaller than its lowland cousin and it’s not often cooked commercially. It doesn’t lend itself to jugging, though there is a marvellous old Scots recipe called bawd bree. Their saddles are tiny, but the pink flavour of the heather and the hills, the wind and the peat, is sublime. Then, to finish, a honey parfait with pickled plums: mild, tart and sharp, with a crumble of oats and pecans.

Service was informed and attentive. The room buzzed with that happy noise of people for whom dinner has mulched an expansive sense of putting life onto its proper plinth. This is a city that, whatever else it doesn’t do, does talk. Brightly and smartly, with wit and learning. It’s the noise of a well-bred, polite Gatling gun. This was the best and most agreeable dinner I’ve eaten all year, not least because it came with such an unexpected serendipity. This food, so plainly and obviously Scots, not just in the use of local and national ingredients, is created with an intelligent craft, an understated assurance, a quietly spoken, humanistic brilliance, here in the city of reason. My city. Nobody in the United Kingdom is cooking or eating better than this, this rowan-bitter, hare-rich, stag-bellow autumn.

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