The Witchery Restaurant

The Witchery, also known as the Witchery by the Castle, is a restaurant on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, right beside the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle. Chef James Thomson founded it in 1979, aged 20, when he became Scotland's youngest licensee. Its name recalls the witch burnings that took place on nearby Castlehill in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Tripadvisor's Travelers' Choice Best of the Best awards rank The Witchery among the world's top fine-dining restaurants: No. 3 in 2025 and No. 4 in 2026.

The restaurant occupies Boswell's Court, a Category A listed building from 1595, and in 1989 it grew into the Secret Garden, a second dining room built on part of a former school playground. Thomson has always treated service as theatre: a waiter, he once said, "is cast in a role". Nine Gothic-style suites with oak panelling and tapestries have hosted guests such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Catherine Zeta-Jones. In 2024, for its 45th anniversary, The Witchery opened a luxury shop on Castlehill with a hidden tasting room behind a secret passage.

Sources of this text: Wikipedia · Tripadvisor