The Stockbridge, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

Stockbridge Restaurant

Review published on 18/07/2005 © Sunday Herald

Once a week I eat in a restaurant, courtesy of the Sunday Herald. I am so regularly presented with bills for anything from £80 to £120 (for a three-course meal for two with a moderate bottle of wine) that I barely flinch. But then I pinch myself and remember this is a lot of money.

Not so long ago, aspiring restaurants kept the cost of starters at between £4.50 and £6. But now that band seems to have moved upwards to £6 to £9. Main courses never used to go much over £18. Now they are pushing £22, even £25.

My suspicion is that if I didn’t review restaurants, I’d rarely visit them. I reckon I’d eat cheap and cheerful when I’d just had enough of cooking, and then carefully research a couple of reliable big restaurant treats for the year, and savour them. Otherwise, when I think what a capable cook can produce at home, eating in generally strikes me as a more attractive proposition than eating out.

So, where does that leave the Stockbridge restaurant which came in at £96 for two, with service, but without coffee? As the Sunday Herald’s restaurant critic I’d commend it to you for its agreeable atmosphere, its much better than average cooking, and affable service. But if it was just me – member of the public – I think I’d find the prices daunting.

To put you in the picture, the Stockbridge restaurant is in an imaginatively decorated basement. The black walls, gold satin drapes, and bright modern art produce a surprisingly swanky environment.

You can tell that a lot of thought and care is going into the cooking. The bread appeared home-made and arrived with a palpably fresh, lemony, herby dip. Some of the cooking is really excellent. I could not fault the creamy asparagus soup with its tiny croutons, crisply fried off in butter, and its restrained overlay of white truffle oil. My grilled halibut was also a well-conceived, well-executed dish, the moist, fleshy fish topped with a crab crust which added a rich marine flavour. The fish sat on a few strands of pasta tagliatelle and tagliatelle of courgette, the whole thing moistened by a sharp lemon beurre blanc and the sweet/sour juices that flowed from confit cherry tomatoes. This was a dish that would pass muster in top restaurants.

Other dishes weren’t quite right. Nuggets of tea-smoked Gressingham duck breasts were beautifully pink, tender and fragrant, but the salad of red cabbage and apple – more like cold braised cabbage – was too unsubtle for this elegant meat. The introduction of nuts might have worked had the walnuts not been caramelised to such a degree that they tasted like sweets. The duck was so fine in itself, it needed just one simple accompaniment, such as a celeriac remoulade salad, to set it off.

Efforts had been made to do something interesting with an Aberdeen Angus fillet (£22). It was a huge piece of meat, sitting on a pancetta rosti and spinach, surrounded by a port wine sauce with fresh chanterelle mushrooms and peas in it.

The beef was also topped with a salsa verde, misspelled operatically as “verdi”. But it ended up being a dish with just too much going on in it. In Italy, salsa verde is served with a classic “bollito”, a selection of warm boiled meats. It doesn’t work with roasted meat, and certainly not when there is already another quite pushy sauce on the plate. At dessert too there was a hit (shortbread biscuits layered up with raspberries and white chocolate mousse), and a miss (sorbets so sweet as to be inedible).

If the Stockbridge restaurant could pull all its dishes up to the standard of its best, then these prices would seem not untoward. Just at the moment, they are too high to pull customers through the door and keep them coming back. That’s a shame because this restaurant has potential.