Many passionate epicures make their way to Perthshire for the sole purpose of dining at Andrew Fairlie, having booked their tables months in advance. When Gleneagles hosted the G8 Summit in 2005, Fairlie, a local culinary prodigy who trained in the southwest of France, cooked for a formidable roster of world leaders including Her Majesty the Queen. His restaurant, tucked inconspicuously into an interior alcove of the resort’s main building, is still Scotland's only two Michelin-starred outfit.

In addition to housing a Michelin-starred restaurant, this restored Georgian mansion just east of Inverness is home to Donald and Wendy Matheson, its devoted conservators and residents of more than twenty years. The impressive structure, originally built in 1825, is surrounded by wildflower meadows and landscaped grounds, including an orchard and kitchen garden that supply Chef Charlie Lockley with organic fruit, vegetables and herbs. His six-course tasting menu is exquisite from the breadbasket (which might contain fennel soda bread or pine nut bread) to the memorable dessert courses (goat's cheese from Devon with homemade oatcakes and plum and shallot purée followed by chocolate cake with pearl barley ice cream).

Still heated by a wood-burning stove, Leakey's is a charming place to sit down and skim the local paper over a cup of coffee and a home-cooked treat. Housed in a converted 18th-century Gaelic church, it is also Scotland's largest secondhand bookshop, filled with antique maps and classic tomes.