Calistoga, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

California Dreaming

Review published on 16/01/2006 © Sunday Herald

If someone sounded me out in advance about the wisdom of starting a Californian restaurant in Scotland, I’d have a few tough questions for them, such as, “Are either you, or your chef, Californian or even American?” Then I’d want to know why they thought that Californian cuisine would work in Scotland.

Just looking at the menu of Calistoga, the Californian restaurant in Edinburgh, the red warning lights started flashing. Turkey and cranberry frittata (berries in an omelette?) with redcurrant aioli. Why redcurrants in deep midwinter? And anyway, aioli is a Provençale garlic mayonnaise. So what on earth is redcurrant aioli?

I can’t say I was thrilled by the idea of a raspberry (yes raspberry) and satsuma salad with quail eggs, even if it also had spinach and beetroot. Especially at £6. Miso-crusted cod with sweet ginger rice? This sounded like a nearly plausible Japanese-type effort, except that the miso crust was like spreading Marmite on fish. Why serve that up with a French-sounding, but not authentically French, ‘petit pois sauce’? And I find it slightly irritating when coriander is called cilantro and rocket is called arugula, just to fit in with the restaurant theme.

We decided to play safe and go for the least outlandish combos. Starters yielded a perfectly competent roasted chestnut soup – albeit it had very little savour of chestnuts, and was capped with crème frâiche that split like yogurt in the soup, and some perfectly adequate, though not outstanding, Chinese-style pork wontons. But the main courses. Oh dear!

There was the most depressingly anaemic-looking ‘corn-fed chicken mole’. Moles are complex Mexican sauces that come in various forms: patiently pounded and prepared mixes of cooked vegetables such as onion and plantain with ground-down seeds (sesame, pumpkin), spices such as cinnamon and oregano, ingredients like bitter chocolate, raisins and chillis.

One thing a mole should always have is vibrant taste. Yet I was looking at a bit of bird which, if it was corn-fed, had had a nasty shock and paled, possibly horrified by the absence of flavour in its barely visible, khaki marinade that seemed to be masquerading as the aforementioned mole. The bird came with arid white sushi rice, a dry, char-grilled tortilla rolled up like a cigar, and a drizzle of mango coulis. The dish cried out for lubrication and colour.

Meanwhile a ‘red truck braised lamb shank’ tasted so plain it might have been boiled. A spoonful of sweet potato, butter bean and chorizo stew helped, the Iberian sausage lending a burst of flavour, but not enough to perk up the grey lamb.

By this point, I was looking at the prices and thinking we were sitting on gimcrack garden furniture, and beginning to think Calistoga was stacking up to be pricey for the quality of food and comfort on offer, a feeling partially compensated for by its estimable policy of adding only £5 to the retail price of wine.

An extensive list features the great and good of Californian wineries. The high priest of global wine biz, Robert Parker, would be in his element. He favours wines that are are deeply coloured, high in alcohol, heavily oaked, low in acidity and free from any challenging tannins – he calls them ‘fruit bombs’. I find them unsubtle and not food-friendly.

Two unspectacular desserts – an eggnog ice-cream with a taste-free bramble coulis and a saffron poached pear which lacked any glimmer of saffron scent – clinched it. We left feeling seriously underwhelmed.