London's first Scottish deli to open after Burns Night

More than £43,000 worth of pledges have been made by supporters on Kickstarter to help make it a reality. 

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The fate was set all those years ago, but the wheels were really set in motion when Boyd founded his company ‘Auld Hag’ in January 2021, delivering haggis, neeps and tatties to Londoners under lockdown. 

Boyd moved to London in 2015 after graduating university to work as an economist. Spending his weekends trawling through the city’s extensive selection of food markets, he was disappointed at the absence of Scottish food options and craved a morning roll and square sausage. 

Gregg Boyd's company Auld Hag delivered haggis neeps and tatties during lockdown (Image: Gregg Boyd)

But it took until lockdown to get the ball rolling. In a more imaginative lockdown activity than yoga or Zoom quizzes, Boyd had the entire block of East London flats he lived in eating haggis, neeps and tatties. 

He then set up a website where people could place orders for his take on the Scottish dish to be delivered and an Instagram page that began to amass a following over the coming months. 

“I’d just put it all in a bag and it would be a nightmare because it would be all smashed up, and I didn’t know if it would be cold. At that time I was trying to make it vegan because my girlfriend is vegan, which is a terrible idea when it comes to mash potatoes - you need loads of butter. 

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“It was just a total experiment and it was a shambles. It should be a shambles, it’s not going to be perfect,” he laughs. 

Auld Hag, with the tagline ‘Purveyors of Scottish scran’, was trading on London’s food market scene by April. It was all still a learning curve for the economist and self-taught chef, but things were moving quickly.

The Shoap will serve classic scran like morning rolls (Image: Gregg Boyd)

“I could barely heat the water, it was again almost a car crash. But by the end of the summer I was trading confidently with other businesses, trying new recipes and starting to get a bit of traction a good six months in - all while trying to sell haggis to people in a London summer,” Boyd says. 

Unbeknownst to the team, a Scottish Government representative stopped at the stall one day, and got in touch the following week asking if they would be interested in doing the catering for Scotland House, its building in the capital. 

“The catering in Scotland House at the time wasn’t really Scottish produce focused, there was a nod to it, but it was just general food like chicken satay skewers. If you’ve got people coming from all over the world, you want it to be, say, Ayrshire prawns or Angus beef.

"The first event we did was for Chinese business investors, so we did a fusion menu of Chinese food with Scottish ingredients, like Irn Bru sweet and sour chicken,” Boyd tells The Herald. 

It was through the work at Scotland House that Boyd was able to fully expand his knowledge on a world that had long fascinated him - Scottish produce. He recalls being fascinated by the way Jamie Oliver discussed the use of different types of ingredients while he watched cooking shows over that summer of being grounded, and later as he worked at a fruit and veg shop while at university in Edinburgh.

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Talking over coffee in a Pret a Manger next door to where the workmen were building his deli, Boyd tells me how running his own food joint had been a dream long before he realised it would be one focusing on the food of his homeland. 

“For my work experience at school, I went to cooking college for a week in Glasgow and loved it. But my mum was like don’t go into that straight away, you could do well at school and get your degree first and then see if you want to come back to food.

“I did that, and even at uni I wanted to set up a food business. I was going to set up a pizza business with my friend. But, you know, we had a uni student mentality - it was so hard to actually do anything about it because you end up just going to the pub,” Boyd says.

The Shoap is not all about Auld Hag’s brand and the thrill of having a cafe with Scottish home favourites in London. The deli running alongside will be selling goods from Scottish producers that Boyd has sourced, mostly through his work with Scotland House. 

“The cafe element is a look back to what you get at home - rolls and square, tattie scones, sausage rolls, then your sweet stuff as well,” he explains. “Like empire biscuits, which are huge in Glasgow. You’re from the East coast, you don’t have empire biscuits, do you?” As a Falkirk-born empire biscuit aficionado, I try not to take offence at this and move on.

Lunchtime will see sandwiches using Scottish pork and cheeses, and Orkney crab toasties (Image: Gregg Boyd)

Lunchtime will see sandwiches using Scottish pork and cheeses, and Orkney crab toasties. In the evening, The Shoap will switch to a bar cafe style, with Tennents on tap, Scottish cider, and a small plates style menu designed to give a taste of Scotland. 

It’s the deli and all it will be selling that Boyd talks about with the most excitement: “The deli is to showcase all of the amazing producers in Scotland which no one seems to know about but are doing amazing things, selling chocolate, jams, whiskeys, beers, ciders. There’s so much up there.”

It’s clear that promoting Scottish ingredients is a big part of the ideology of Auld Hag, and something Boyd feels is not pushed enough. He’s always trying to find new producers for the Scotland House gig, focusing on a different region each event and contacting local champions of the area and tourist bodies to find the best ones. 

“We’re slowly building a directory of these people, so that we can support them in the shop and give them promotion, because they’re not really promoting themselves as a lot of them don’t understand that side of it. 

“New, younger ones are using social media, but the ones doing seafood, meat and cheese are usually quite old, they have been running a business for 60, 70 years and they barely know how to use the computer to process the orders – so finding them is really hard. 

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“Every one of these suppliers needs a social media person - it should almost be a focus for the government to say ‘Right, we’ve got fantastic produce - why are we not selling it, why does it not have a brand?” Boyd says. 

The 30-year-old certainly does know how to use social media - the way Auld Hag has taken off is in large part thanks to it.

Pledges to help fund it spiked after Boyd shot Instagram reels which received thousands of views on how to make a morning roll, and his own take of the famous Burnistoun “nae rolls” sketch - which illustrated his point of why Scots in London needed a Shoap. 

But he is wary of the power of social media, and does not want it to take The Shoap too far. Cafes on the London food scene have become known for going “TikTok viral” and see hour-long queues out their doors. 

Gregg Boyd is opening his Scottish deli in Angel, London (Image: Gregg Boyd)

“The TikTok stuff kind of scares me. I’m like an old guy sometimes. I’m very aware of the power of social media. If TikTok vloggers come in I can’t stop them, I can’t ban them. But having someone in there with a ring light, I don’t know if that’s the vibe - I’d be a bit nervous about someone looking in and seeing that.

“I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone’s name who comes in and becoming a proper shop, and building a community out of it too. That’s what makes me excited, so I don’t mean to crap on vloggers, but I’m worried that kind of thing would take away from the whole point of The Shoap,” Boyd says. 

The Shoap is aiming to open in the weeks following Burns Night, with a date still to be confirmed, at 406 St John Street in Angel, in the London borough of Islington.