Oink, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

Where pigs might fly

Review published on 01/12/2008 © Sunday Herald

I was sceptical when I heard that a cafe-takeaway had opened in Edinburgh selling only one dish. My pessimism about its future viability was less to do with the nature of that dish - hog roast, or roast pork if you prefer - than the fact that no matter how much you might like some pork in a bun, there's a limit to how often you'd want to eat it. Now that I've visited Oink in Victoria Street, the capital's thriving indy shopping venue, I have adjusted my assessment.

Open from 11am to late (or whenever the pork runs out), it was going like a fair, doing a trade that would gladden the heart of any chip shop or kebab bar proprietor.

The concept of hog roast will be familiar to aficionados of farmers' markets. You have a whole pig that looks like a tableau from a mediaeval banquet. No anonymous body parts here, carefully disguised to hide any suggestion that they ever belonged to a living creature. Instead, a still recognisable pig, with ears and snout, even eyelashes, roasted so its skin is bronzed and crisp.

This is honest food, not for tender, anthropomorphising hearts, and there were a few of those in the vicinity. The vision of a whole pig in a window is arresting and certainly creates a stir that sarnies in plastic cartons do not. It demands a reaction. Everyone I overheard remarked on the smell. Some found it seductive, others worryingly real. This section of Victoria Street is Aroma Central, with the enticing aromas of ripe cheese that greet you at the excellent Iain Mellis cheesemonger next door. We are so used to sterile, odour-free food, anything with an aroma can disturb us.

The pork comes in a roll, a mixture of meat and crackling, or if the crackling is too threatening, just the meat. You choose between brown and white rolls, and either a combination of sage and onion stuffing and apple sauce, or chilli sauce - and that's it. I was surprised by just how good the meat tasted. It was unexpected because the pigs used are just the standard Large White cross Landrace breed and are not free-range. They are reared near Eyemouth, and one of the farmers who runs the enterprise, Adam Marshall, tells me that they are quality-assured and kept in good welfare conditions with lots of straw. The crackling was impeccable - the pigs take nine hours to roast, briefly at a searing heat to start the crackling, then at a low, slow temperature. Personally, I could eat a roll just with the crackling, because I find it so beguiling.

This is a food producers' venture rather than a foodie one and that shows. Everything other than the pork and the home-made stuffing could be vastly improved. The rolls are standard industrial Scottish baps. The bought-in apple sauce has those hard cubes surrounded by starchy gloop. The chilli sauce tastes of very little. The drinks selection is only marginally better than you'd find in a chippie. Some quality awareness, and a commitment to making more from scratch - an honest-to-goodness apple sauce, a piquant chilli sauce with the heady aroma of fresh chillies - now that would elevate the offering to another level entirely.

Oink could raise its game with packaging too.

The hog roast-filled rolls are served up in ugly, environmentally ruinous Styrofoam containers.

You can see them building up in ugly, unrecyclable mountains in the bin along with plastic cutlery. These days you can get biodegradable alternatives made from cornstarch and other materials. Any thinking food takeaway needs to get up to speed with the possibilities.

I sense something of a trend here. Well Hung And Tender, another farmer-owned takeaway, has opened in Edinburgh's Castle Street, featuring burgers, steak sandwiches and salads made with its grass-fed Aberdeen Angus beef. But it lacks the visual stimulus to appetite supplied by the magnificent hog roast, as the meat is kept in lidded, cafeteria-style steel containers.

Perhaps these outlets will build up a trade like you see at the famed Antica Focacceria San Francesco in Palermo, with its legendary "pane con milza". Mind you, it might take several hundred years - boiled spleen in a bun isn't everyone's idea of lunch.