Stu left school at 17 to pursue a career in dentistry, which meant collecting glasses at night in bars and pulling the teeth out of dead people by day.

Fine if you’ve got a strong stomach, which he doesn’t and aren’t haemophobic, which he is. The combination of hangovers and blood proved too much, so he ditched the blood and stuck with the hangovers, committing full time to what we might fairly loosely call ‘hospitality’.

A few years running places in Edinburgh were followed by a move to London to be the opening head bartender at 69 Colebrooke Row. Dentistry had given him a fairly basic idea of how the mouth works and this was where the science of flavour began to interest him, leading him to work in consultancy for Strangehill in 2011 and to open Crucible in 2017.