Tony's Table, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

Cards on the Table

Review published on 13/04/2009 © Sunday Herald

If you have ever moved into a place that you can barely afford, then you’ll have learned to live with features you hate until you have the means to get rid of them.

That said, if I was taking on Tony’s Table in Edinburgh, formerly the Circus Wine Bar and Cosmo’s, I would tear up the carpet as soon as I got the keys, even if it meant living with splinters, old paint and broken lino for the forseeable future. You used to see carpets like this in bad chain brewery pubs. It swims before your eyes in psychedelic avant-garde shapes, while its hepatic tones soak up all available light. Occasionally retro eyesores have vintage charm. Not this one. Its screaming bad taste makes anything nice around it look hideous.

Half-moon wall mirrors in a peculiarly bilious shade of Irn-Bru are hard to love, too. They should also be on the “fit for the skip” list but I suspect they won’t be going anywhere. The name may conjure up a casino restaurant in pre-Castro Cuba, but Tony’s Table is very much a restaurant de nos jours.

Chef Tony Singh of Oloroso fame has got together with Rangers chairman Sir David Murray and reinvented these ailing restaurant premises as a recession-busting brasserie. It looks very much like a hasty attempt to “do a Dogs” and replicate the success of David Ramsden’s gastropub two streets away, The Dogs.

Mr Ramsden has a way of combining wacky touches with auction-sale junk to create a sort of austerity chic. Tony’s Table, saddled with its inherited decor and its awkward, bipartite, cavernous space, lacks this sure touch. Ramsden also knows how to make thrifty food enticing, underpinning the menu with the logic of seasonality and tradition. Tony’s Table, on the other hand, looks like a less-assured attempt to position itself at the restaurant world’s new beating heart – low-cost dining – by adopting a deracinated mishmash of culinary conventions.

If the food is semi-decent, then you can’t quibble at a three-course dinner menu for £20, and there were some good ideas in what we had. Cauliflower, roasted in thin slices (now there’s a novelty), shone when slathered with “pomegranate harissa” which tasted like a happy synthesis of Middle Eastern pomegranate molasses and the eponymous North African chilli paste. Some people would look at this dish and think, “Hmm, just cauliflower? Is that it?” but I liked it a lot, ditto a starter of rabbit and yellow split pea terrine.

Rabbit again for main course (you’ll have gathered that I love this gamey white meat), this time “crispy rabbit” or, more accurately, bits of rabbit breadcrumbed and deep-fried. I was enthusiastic until my teeth met bone. There’s a lesson here. When small bones are lurking in the depths of what looks like a breadcrumbed nugget or a paté, they are a menace. A pity really because, boned, the rabbit bits would have worked well, and they came with good accompaniments: bashed-up, skin-on potatoes and a formidable salsa verde that was generous with capers and fragrant with mint.

The other main course of “cod & squatties” looked worryingly like packet savoury rice, or something you might swerve to avoid on the pavement. It seemed to belong to the same era as the carpet. Flakes of fish and the odd squat lobster tail were lost in overcooked rice made mushy and dark by a lobster sauce. The sauce had a fine, deep flavour but just made the rice gloopy and cuppa-soupy. This isn’t contemporary thrift food, it’s just a badly thought-out mess.

Puddings at Tony’s Table hark back to the nursery and the 1950s. Black cap pudding, described as “steamed treacle sponge pudding” didn’t taste of treacle at all. It was just sticky and anonymously sweet on the top, and dessicated at the base. Baked lemon curd Alaska was inoffensive, but instantly unmemorable.

Neither dessert seemed quite grown-up, adding to the feeling that the menu here is either a bit confused, or at least the logic behind it is unfathomable. All these random ideas need sorted out if Tony’s Table is to make any sense at all.