The St Andrews best restaurant cup 2025
Join me as we have a fun competition to find the best restaurant in St Andrews
So it’s time to put the “restaurants” of St Andrews through the magic of the cup, or maybe it should be a quaich in Scotland, who knows, quite frankly who cares! This is a rollercoaster of a tournament with no VAR getting in the way, just pure opinion, conjecture and quite frankly some bias and favouritism on my part. I should say I have no reason to favour anyone over my own taste and belly!
So, recently helping some friends organise a trip to St Andrews the conversation came around to which are the best restaurants, and so a quick google took me to the list of the top 100 ranked restaurants on Trip Advisor which threw out quite the list and quite a few surprises, which got me thinking I really hope that people who are visiting St Andrews don’t actually use this list. There are restaurants that are closed, some that are not in St Andrews (not even in Scotland!), some have changed there names, some are duplicates, and some are all in the same hotel. On top of that some are missing completely!
Sure, giving a place an average rating and then ranking them is a good way to go about it, but where is the fun in that? I decided to create a knockout, 1 v 1, just like the FA Cup, a straight fight to the final and an eventual crowning of the champion.
Some ground rules include:
This is just my opinion
It’s a cup so the draw could scupper a really great restaurant just through the draw, though I’ve done my best to spread this out.
It’s based on a 1 v 1 and which one would I choose to eat in and I’ll make a case for each match up (i.e. some are pubs that do food, some are café’s some are hotel restaurants). On occasion we may find that one “owner” who has multiple venues actually has their own places competing against each other.
Most people who read my stuff have found me through golf, and so I’m kind of making an assumption that you are here for golf and are looking for places to eat (though I’m trying to avoid the obvious, men just want steaks, and women wants cocktails stereotypes).
I may change the rules as we go, who knows! Maybe if I’m unsure about a winner, I’ll ask people to vote.
I may have missed a restaurant or two, so may have to chuck the old wildcard in somewhere, who knows!
On then to the draw.
I took the hundred restaurants, took out duplicates, removed those I know are closed, added a few that were missing, and kept in those I’ve never heard of or not sure if they are open or closed and will find out the situation. Given it’s a knockout I then took way too long to work out how to make this work, but came down on seeding the top 32 ranked and gave them a bye into the second round, then placed the rest into a draw and randomly drew them for the first round.
Here is the draw in full, and I’ll now begin working my way through these matches, updating the results in my next post.
I hope you enjoy the competition, I hope it also helps you plan a trip to St Andrews, I also hope I don’t offend any brilliant people or venues in St Andrews, this is just a bit of fun (but based on living here).
