21212, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

Number crunch

Review published on 15/06/2009 © Sunday Herald

Expect confusion over Edinburgh’s new upmarket restaurant. It’s called 21212, so the name is hard to remember and easy to get wrong. It might stick in your head if you understood the thinking behind it: a choice of two dishes, followed by a set dish, followed by another choice of two dishes, followed by a set dish, followed by another choice of two dishes. No, I haven’t hit the repeat button by mistake.

When you finally digest what it means you find a considerably smaller choice than normal, despite all those numbers. Next stumbling block is the name of the chef, Paul Kitching. Please note that final “g” and do not mix up with the brightest star in the capital’s culinary firmament, Tom Kitchin. They are two different people. And if you were still labouring under the misapprehension that the latter’s restaurant is called The Kitchen with an “e”, then please keep up.

As a place, 21212 is quite incredible, a fabulous Palladian-style town house on sweeping Royal Terrace that has been given a no-expense-spared refurb of a highly original, supremely effective sort. I haven’t seen anything quite like it. If there’s a theme, perhaps it’s a diaphanous moth’s wing or a leaf skeleton in silvery greens, bronze, lichens, dull golds. The papered walls are softened with gauze curtains. It seems as if there isn’t a straight line in sight. One serpentine banquette (I’m guessing 50 feet or longer) runs the length of the dining room. Each table, each chair is idiosyncratically shaped. The botanical leitmotif extends to the etched glass window that looks into the kitchen and the leafy garden beyond. It’s all quite arboreal and rather special.

I can’t in all honesty whole-heartedly recommend 21212 to you, however. Dinner costs £60 a head and for that money, I need to be blown away. I wasn’t. Despite being mightily impressed by Kitching’s multiple skills and techniques, the food is too cerebral, too mentally clever for my taste. A dish intriguingly described as “warm scallops, seven peas, tomato butter” encapsulated the problem. The bivalves tasted as if they had been sat in a warm place. Is this the same thing as cooking? I’m not sure. Anyway, they had no interesting exterior/interior contrast and didn’t appear to be seasoned. The seven “ps” turned out to shorthand for pistachio (caramelised), pimento, potato (one chip), peas, pancake (minuscule and flavoured with saffron), Perail (a goat cheese) and parsley (fried). Did it work? Not for me. A surfeit of individual elements doesn’t constitute one satisfying whole.

All dishes, which are served in asymmetric bowls that are irritating to eat out of, are similarly constructed. The weirdest one was the baked turbot, another Polly Pocket-sized neutral morsel of protein that came with dates, swede purée, fried brazil nuts, lentils, chorizo, yellow courgette, some crunchy fried thing that might have been sweet potato, a fragment of wafer and another unidentifiable element, that may have been desiccated, finely sliced rhubarb. Mind you, the beef fillet was wacky too – more bland, plain meat in a posse of broccoli, cauliflower purée, olives, macadamia nuts, a mystery foam and a sticky substance that tasted very much like lemon curd. Some individual tastes, like the braised endive that accompanied an anodyne morsel of chicken, were quite exciting. They just didn’t stack up to make coherent dishes.

At desserts, presentation covered for ordinariness. A competent egg custard wasn’t improved by its accompanying banana-heavy trifle, the latter squashed into an espresso cup. A pleasant enough if unexceptional “savoury” cheesecake (reminiscent of a Sicilian cassata filling) was similarly confined under a green foam. The medicinal ginger and nutmeg sorbet that flanked it melted almost instantly. A pre-dessert of sweetened oat and coconut milk served from a porcelain cow jug was novel, but odd.

The most successful dish was an unctuous carrot and apple soup which sat on a base of artichoke heart and pine kernels under a floating roof of crisp salami topped with cauliflower foam and green apple “strings” (made from apple and gelatine). We were grateful, also, for the cheese course, seven nicely ripened specimens – six French, one Irish – commendably served at room temperature. Even then the elaboration seemed excessive. I mean, are oatcakes improved by adding caraway or currants?

A star that fails to shine

Review published on 10/03/2010 © Sunday Herald

Damn, I'm getting a subliminal image. It’s Thunderbirds, as in Thunderbirds Are Go. I can't get it out of my head. From the moment I see the cartoon colours of the restaurant sign then slide into the dining room - all heavy drapes, oversized furniture and swooping lines reminiscent of a tart's boudoir - and clock the extraordinary glassed-off kitchen cum lab at the back it's in there. Eek.

The kitchen staff look like they're wearing Virgil Tracy-style caps with numbers on them. And is that dry ice emanating from the door? The mental picture only momentarily disappears when the waiter brings a ceramic cow to the table and starts to pour flavoured milk into a paper cup. Seriously. Then I am suddenly getting Damien Hirst. As in: this is supposed to be art. Isn't it? But is it art? Or is it fun? Or is it a paean to the pretentious? ... It's borderline surreal, in a good way.

Let's rewind. This is officially the UK's best new restaurant, according to the National Restaurant Awards, the recipient of a Michelin star within only eight months of opening, with a £65-a-head, fixed menu of bewildering silliness and an even sillier name that should actually be: Choice Of. As in: there's a choice of two dishes then one then two then one then two across the five courses.

Not that there's much of a choice, the menu just containing lists of ingredients. As in: glazed lemon and cucumber curds, sunflower seeds, couscous, whole almonds and Genoese fruit cake anglaise. It's like reading the back of the packet and trying to work out what something is going to taste like.

It doesn't get any easier when the dishes actually arrive. Consider this: warm olive oil-poached scallop, saffron pancake, bean sprouts and aubergine, plum and yogurt puree, mangetout, chestnuts and a creamy sauce made from peas, lettuce and watercress.

That's one starter. It tastes exactly like it says on the packet - an array of flavours and textures, all prepared with technical brilliance, none of them bearing the slightest relation to each other. It also seriously lacks seasoning. The overriding impression is that scallops taste a lot better seared than boiled in oil.

in But let's not be harsh. This restaurant undoubtedly has presence. The entrance hall with efficient women hovering around a desk at the top is momentarily intimidating, but the staff are expert in compensating for the slightly stultifying surroundings by being informal and chatty.

The other customers are the usual mixed bag you only seem to get in Edinburgh - a couple of posh gents over there, one drinking his wine from a straw, quite a few beardy blokes and a glamorous young couple by the door. It's borderline surreal, in a good way.

And the bread, baked with fruit and spices, is superb, almost doughy with intense sweetness and enough salt to confuse the senses. Unfortunately there is dried and fresh fruit in everything and not enough salt in anything else. Foams a go-go slide down every picture-perfect plate.

You spend half the time trying to work out what you're eating and the other half trying to work out what the chef was thinking. I won't even bother detailing what's in the main course save to say there's a fillet of beef, a confit of pineapple, yeast, coriander and umpteen other things.

There's nothing wrong with paying £65 for a meal if it blows the mind and lodges for a long time in the memory. There's no problem with detailing ingredients on the menu if it all becomes blindingly clear on the plate. There's even no harm in mismatched, slightly uncomfortable and a tad pretentious decor if the overall aim is to focus everything on the food. But none of the above applies.

This confection of a restaurant with carefully thought-out cues and fun affectations falls flat on its face because the food simply does not have the flavour to carry it off - and that's a real shame.