Lang may his lum reek
Thursday, March 20, 2025 at 11:24 I had lunch yesterday with Ranald Macdonald, founder and MD of Boisdale Restaurants.
Ranald missed the Forest lunch at Boisdale last year because of ill health but if he sounded a bit croaky yesterday it’s because he was recovering from the annual ‘Shooting Chefs’ competition that took place the day before.
No, I had never heard of it either, but the Boisdale Shooting Chefs Cup (now in its tenth year) brings together 25 or 30 of the country’s most accomplished young chefs to compete ‘in celebration of the consumption of British game across the country’.
The competition took place, I think, at the Holland & Holland Shooting Grounds in West London. Afterwards everyone boarded a Routemaster bus and were driven to the Belgravia restaurant for a boozy three-course lunch.
Although the purpose of our meeting yesterday was to discuss the details of a forthcoming Forest lunch, including the menu, the conversation occasionally went off piste.
For example, when I mentioned I am going to Skye next month, Ranald offered to arrange a private tour of the Museum of the Isles which just happens to focus on Clan Macdonald.
(Ranald - or Ranald Og Angus Macdonald, to give him his full name - is the elder son of the 24th captain and chief of Clan Macdonald of Clanranald.)
He also revealed he has just bought a five-bedroom house in the Outer Hebrides - without, it seems, having visited it (the house not the islands).
It’s 21 years since I first reached out to him. In 2004 Forest’s office in Palace Street was half a mile from Boisdale of Belgravia, the original Boisdale restaurant.
Ranald, who founded Boisdale in 1989, was happy to support our campaign against the workplace smoking ban, and one of our first events was a small private dinner at Boisdale of Bishopsgate (now closed).
Guests that evening included David Hockney (who told me it had been a “life-enhancing experience”) and Oscar-winning screenwriter, the late Sir Ronald Harwood.
In 2006 Ranald joined us at the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth where we hosted a Prohibition themed reception for almost 400 people, the highlight of which was Boisdale’s MD being ‘arrested’ by actors wearing police uniforms who charged him with “inciting people to enjoy themselves”.
He was marched off to the accompaniment of ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’.
Looking back it remains one of my favourite Forest events, and I still remember the morning after when we sat on the terrace of our hotel in the autumn sunshine, eating breakfast and recovering from the night before.
Since then we’ve hosted numerous events at the Belgravia and Canary Wharf restaurants (the latter opened in 2011), culminating in our 40th anniversary dinner at Boisdale of Canary Wharf in 2019 when 200 guests were invited to mark the occasion.
Our most successful event is probably the gala dinner we hosted at the Savoy Hotel in London a few days before the introduction of the smoking ban in 2007.
The original plan was to host it at Boisdale of Belgravia but the Eccleston Street restaurant can only accommodate 70 people in the main restaurant and we wanted to go big to mark one of the last occasions when people could eat, drink and smoke in an indoor ‘public’ place.
Organised at four weeks’ notice, our target was 200 guests in the 400-capacity ballroom.
On the night there were 380 people, including 300 who paid £96 per head, plus guest speakers Andrew Neil, Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox), and Antony Worrall Thompson. (The freebies went to MPs, peers, journalists and other special guests.)
The event also attracted reporters and film crews from twelve countries including Russia, France, Germany and Greece, while the BBC sent a team from Newsnight.
Eighteen years later we’re still planning, and plotting. Lang may his lum reek.
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