Cafe Fish, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

Fish out of water

Review published on 25/11/2009 © Sunday Herald

Like a budget airline, Cafe Fish in Leith is surreptitiously expensive. It offers three courses at dinner for £23, but most of the dishes - probably the ones you'd want - carry supplements. Just as budget air carriers levy additional charges for a holdall, Cafe Fish wants you to stump up an extra £5 for scallops, £10 for lobster and £3 for a plate of chips or salad leaves.

I wouldn't carp if the ingredients were anything special. Great seafood costs money, but the piscine line-up here is entirely predictable. Our waitress was sweet, so it felt a bit mean to keep on asking her questions about sustainability and sourcing when she was so clearly at sea, but we did establish by way of the kitchen that both the salmon and sea bass were the ubiquitous farmed sort. When we asked about the cod, an alarmingly fished-out species, we got the unsatisfactory answer that it was from the North Atlantic, which is way too vague.

Cafe Fish also seems to think that as long as you can say you use small suppliers, that covers any questions about the provenance of ingredients. But most restaurants have small, local suppliers. That's no guarantee of ethics or quality. Restaurateurs need to apply themselves to the detail, particularly when it comes to fish.

The front of house team and kitchen brigade are young, redolent of the early Jamie Oliver or his youth-apprenticeship restaurant, Fifteen. With zinc-topped tables and noisy informality, there is the necessary buzz that style-conscious diners crave. When we visited, the clientele was predominately aged between 20 and 40. An open kitchen with flaming skillets and sweaty brows cranks up the atmosphere. But when you start tasting what emerges from the kitchen, you yearn for a grown-up with a more experienced palate to take charge. The food tastes assembled rather than cooked. The non-negotiable requirement to season food and taste it doesn't seem to have registered here. The kitchen's grasp of the principles of cooking seems shallow.

My "diver-caught" scallops were the only item on the menu that specified the fishing method, yet, disappointingly, they tasted of curiously little. They didn't seem to have been seasoned at all and their searing was timid. The crab, which had been given a Thai-style treatment on incongruous dry Italianate crostini, was equally mute and dominated by pungent raw onion in the accompanying salad.

Of the two mains, the lobster was the most spectacularly bad. It looked like a spiny lobster, not the bigger type with claws. Either that or the claws had gone walkabout. A spiny lobster is essentially a large langoustine and so when you only get half of one, as I did, it makes for precious little eating, which is normally a grievance but in this case was no bad thing as the flesh was tough, flavourless and tragically overcooked. It came with a "tomato and herb risotto" which looked and tasted like a crude tomato sauce to which some rice had been added. That is not the same as a bona fide risotto. There were also strands of something firm and fibrous in it. Onion skin, we wondered?

The other main course recalled 1960s invalid food: a thin fillet of dry, again under-seasoned (possibly unseasoned) lemon sole with a pile of spinach still exuding water and "chive mash", which was just mash with a few chopped chives on top. The mash tasted past the prime of youth. Our £3 worth of roasted vegetables included bitter, unseasonal asparagus, watery tomatoes, courgettes and aubergines which tasted as if they had been shown the interior of a lukewarm wok then kept warm for a time.

A crumble topping on plums tasted of burnt flour and coated the roof of the mouth. Its custard tasted like watered-down creme Anglaise. Creme brulee was served hot from the blowtorch without having been cooled.

Youthful and out of its depth, Cafe Fish should be sent back to college.