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Gordon Minnis is the owner of Calistoga, an Edinburgh restaurant specialising in Californian food and wine. The restaurant recently won the Best Speciality category at the Scottish Restaurant Awards which were sponsored by 5pm.

Named after a Napa Valley spa town, Calistoga opened on St Leonard Street in 2004. Gordon opened a second branch on Rose Street Lane North in August 2008. He closed the original branch earlier this year to concentrate on the city centre Calistoga.

While the food plays a central role at Calistoga, the wine part of the equation is hugely important. As well as running the Sideways wine shop, Calistoga hosts popular wine tasting dinners. Starting at £30 per person, including a three course dinner and coffee, these are informal, tutored tastings which take place before the meal in Calistoga’s tasting room.

Along with the tutored wine dinners, Calistoga also hosts presentation dinners from Californian wine makers. A recent event saw several Napa Valley winemakers come to Edinburgh to talk about their wines and share them over dinner.

Q) How did you get started in the restaurant business?

GM) I started in 1991 as a breakfast waiter at a hotel on Princes Street. My training was ‘Here’s a teapot and here’s a coffee pot. There is a 150 people, go and serve them’.

For some reason, that didn’t put me off and I progressed and ended up as restaurant manager at the Caledonian Hotel and then I did stints as restaurant manager at Haldanes, Jackson’s and a few spells at the Sheraton.

Q) Why did you choose to open a Californian restaurant?

GM) When you work for other people then you always have ideas for your own place and California was one of the ideas that I had in my head. The fact that it was healthy food appealed to me. I thought it would be something different and unique and that’s what clinched it. Wine was also a huge part of it. Showcasing Californian wines was certainly one of the main reasons for opening my own restaurant.

Q) Were you always a fan of Californian wines?

GM) Californian wine became a passion for me when I was working at Haldanes. We had a lot of American customers in there and they were interested in their own wines. We didn’t sell a lot of it. Even now, in Edinburgh’s better restaurants, Californian wine is something of an afterthought.

I got interested in it and built up the Californian wine list at Haldanes but also started to build my own collection. That became part of my original wine list when I opened my own restaurant.

Q) Why do you think Californian wine does not have the same profile or popularity as, say, Australian wines?

GM) They have always had a very strong domestic market so haven’t needed to expand abroad in the same way that, say, the New Zealand wine makers have had to. But when they have exported their wines, it has been because they have wanted to be seen against the rest of the world. They think they make good stuff and they want people in other markets to see it.

Q) How did the wine dinners start?

GM) The idea stemmed from Sideways, our wine shop which we opened next to the original restaurant in 2006. We used to have tastings there which were based on the sort of tastings that you might have at a Californian winery: you pay your five dollars and get a bit of chat from the winemaker and taste some wines. It was popular not just with people who had been to California and experienced it themselves but also with people who had seen the movie Sideways.

Making wine is a science but it is also an art and customers like to hear from the people who make wine. Last November, we had a Thanksgiving wine fair followed by dinner and that was very popular so we’ll probably do that again.

The Napa Valley vintners events were a big hit. We had about seventy people in for dinner over the two nights.

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Q) Are the wine tastings a big draw for your customers?

GM) Getting people to come to a restaurant is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle in that you need to get the various pieces in the right places before it looks good enough for them to make a booking. We have very good chefs who cook great food. If they didn’t then the wine tastings wouldn’t help. Along with the food and awards like the Best Speciality Restaurant, the wine tastings are a way of getting people to come. All the pieces of the jigsaw have to work together.

Q) The food at Calistoga has some adventurous combinations of ingredients. Is it the sort of food you like?

GM) I’m the most boring eater in the world. I would probably only eat about a third of our menu. I’m just not a great experimenter. I was brought up in Lanarkshire in the Seventies which maybe wasn’t the best place for adventurous food at the time. I’ve progressed from there but I’m not a foodie pioneer.

Q) So what’s the most exotic thing you’ve eaten?

GM) Langoustines in France. When I was a child, maybe eight or nine, we were in France and, by accident, bumped into a family that my father had worked with. We ate with them and they had these big langoustines. Us kids thought they were beasties and refused to eat them until we were shown how. When we did they were delicious but I still have a visual memory of these beasties.

I realise that it’s not very exotic now but, for a child in the mid-Seventies, it was. Fishermen in Scotland were probably landing lots of langoustines at the time but not many people were eating them in Lanarkshire.