Bank holiday Monday evening was highlighted by a meal at Restaurant Martin Wishart, situated on a stretch of the Leith shorefront.

Here three Michelin-starred chefs separately ply their trade and diners sample the six-course tasting menu, whose excellence is emphasised by the price — written not with the sterling symbol, but in words: Sixty Pounds.

But what’s this? A female customer is complaining, insisting Wishart’s scallops haven’t come from Loch Awe, as advertised, because scallops don’t live in Loch Awe. She subjects three waiters to debates on the Ordnance Survey co-ordinates of Scotland’s mollusc population before Wishart himself has to be prised away from those little brass pots (that proper chefs use), to come to the front of house to settle the topic.

The next morning Wishart and his fish supplier Stevie discuss the matter with all the tut-tutting that is the true expert’s birthright. Their subtext is obvious: a little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing — not that it’s Wishart who’s short of the stuff. No, in the driven and obsessional world of the professional sauce-stirrer, Wishart is a breed apart, slightly to one side of Scotland’s chef fraternity, intense and somewhat disengaged.

“Deep” is a word I twice hear used by acquaintances to describe him. It’s a term used only rarely to describe such peers as Nick Nairn, the heartthrob of Perthshire’s matronly quiche-bakers, and Gordon Ramsay, the Pied Piper of chefly self-love.

Next year sees the tenth anniversary of Restaurant Martin Wishart, which has one of the most acclaimed kitchens in the country. Despite repeated requests, its proprietor refuses to appear on food shows such as Ready Steady Cook, Great British Menu or Saturday Kitchen, declining implacably to be folded into the flaky pastry of the chef as entertainer.

“I can’t be bothered travelling down to London for screen tests,” he says. “The producers would find my passion for the food a bit bland and boring. I can’t do flamboyant things with my hands, and I can’t crack jokes.

“It’s a bad thing because I get a lot of young chefs asking me for a job, and more than 50% want books and Michelin stars and restaurants with their names above the doors. They forget that being a chef can be quite mundane. With being a chef, if you don’t actually love it, then you’ll hate it.”

Yet today’s “named” chefs cannot prosper by remaining locked in their own kitchens, and that’s tricky if you’re like Wishart and temperamentally unsuited for much beyond spooning rhubarb curd over foie gras and smoked pheasant.

The brand has, however, been extended through his cook school, a swizzily urban, high-tech facility that is also in Leith, and a dine-at-home service that prepares Wishart-standard food for dinner parties.

And 10 years into his solo career, after an apprenticeship under Michel Roux at Le Gavroche in Mayfair, Wishart has produced a book. A weighty chopping board of a tome, Cook Book is food porn at its most lustrous and indulgent, its 100-odd recipes designed and simplified to allow Wishart’s classic French stylings to be approximated by even the most rudimentarily skilled in the kitchen.

“In the first few years after opening the restaurant, I was repeatedly approached to do books,” he says, “but it was always books about food you’d eat in the restaurant, not about food you could cook at home.

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