The Italian Banquet Company cooks at castles and country houses across Aberdeenshire and the north-east of Scotland, and Lickleyhead Castle is one we keep coming back to. A recurring venue is a quiet privilege in this work. Most of the time you cook a place once — you learn its kitchen in a single frantic day and you never see it again. A castle you return to is different. You build a relationship with the building, with the people who run it, and with the particular way a meal wants to be served inside its walls.
A Castle That Knows Us
Lickleyhead is a 16th-century tower house in the Aberdeenshire countryside — thick stone, deep windows, the kind of rooms that hold candlelight beautifully once the sun drops behind the fields. It is a private, characterful place, and the people who care for it have come to know our cooking firsthand, across more than one visit. That matters more than it sounds. When a venue's own people trust the food you bring into their walls, every booking starts from a place of confidence rather than caution.
Why Coming Back Makes the Food Better
The first time you cook anywhere, half your attention goes to the room itself — where the power is, how the oven really behaves, how long it takes to carry a plate from the kitchen to the table without it cooling. Return to a place and all of that quiet logistics falls away. You already know the building. You can spend the whole of your attention on the food and the people, which is exactly where it should go.
There is also something in the way a recurring venue lets you cook to the room rather than against it. A tower house wants a certain kind of meal — unhurried, generous, candlelit, the courses arriving in their own time. Knowing that in advance, you plan a menu that belongs in those rooms instead of one that simply happens to be served there.
The North-East Setting
Aberdeenshire is castle country, and a wedding or a celebration at a place like Lickleyhead has a romance that a function room can never manufacture. Couples and hosts come for the stone and the history and the sense of having the whole place to themselves. Our job is to make the food live up to the setting — hand-made pasta and the best of the north-east larder, cooked on site, served in rooms that have been hosting feasts for four hundred years.
That is the gift of a venue you return to: each visit, the cooking gets a little more at home. And a meal cooked by people who feel at home in a place tastes like it.
Giuseppe Manzoli is the founder and head chef of The Italian Banquet Company, cooking weddings, private dinners and celebrations at castles and country houses across Aberdeenshire and the north-east of Scotland — a full chef's brigade that comes to you and cooks on site.