Trattoria Siciliana, Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

Walk pasta

Review published on 28/11/2005 © Sunday Herald

Call it naïve if you like, but I was labouring under the delusion that Italian restaurants in Britain had improved. Long gone, or so I thought, was the spectre of the Sixties trattoria serving up cynical Brito-Italian travesties to a population who didn’t know any better.

So I leapt to the entirely wrong conclusion that Trattoria Siciliana would be a trattoria in the modern sense – one that was true to Sicilian traditions and reflected the fascinating flavours of this sun-soaked isle.

In retrospect, there were lots of signs to the contrary. There was the odd, lingering smell when you walk in, which I now realise was cigar smoke. When he isn’t cooking, the chef likes to sit in the restaurant and light up the sort of cigars that Fidel Castro now shuns.

With the exception of a spaghetti alla Norma – which is the classic Sicilian pasta dish – the menu is generic Italian. Then there was the bank of microwaves in the kitchen. From my very partial view, I counted no less than four. Our brusque, charmless waitress – Latvian? Czech? Polish? – spoke even less English than you might pick up from watching bad American TV with sub-titles.

Our first attempts to order, hampered by communication difficulties, were unsuccessful, not least because more or less everything we wanted was off the menu that night. Persevering, we ordered cannelloni and spinach gnocchi as starters. The latter, according to the menu, was meant to come in a creamy cheese sauce. In fact, it arrived in a thick tomato gloop with an acidity reminiscent of those jars of khaki-green pasteurised pesto. This gloop was to be a hallmark of all savoury dishes.

We spotted the drill early on. The chef would take ingredients in various pre-cooked states from unbearably noisy display unit and disappear into the kitchen with them. In minutes, they would come back in sizzling bowls. I say sizzling, but they had that particular uneven microwaved quality, being piping hot at some points and tepid at others. Dishes here are not so much cooked from scratch as assembled from pre-prepared components in different permutations. Many commercial kitchens use microwaves, and not just for melting chocolate. But seeing it done blatantly before your eyes does dull the appetite somewhat.

The gnocchi was just about edible but not at all enticing. The cannelloni was a gluey mess, with a solid mat of mince, a sauce almost identical to that on the gnocchi and no obvious trace of white sauce. It tasted of old dried herbs, oregano possibly, or thyme. We really should have left when the main courses arrived, but we were slow learners. Spezzatino con piselli was the least bad of the two. The few cubes of beef were tender but were lost in even more of the lukewarm tomato gloop, this time mixed with frozen peas and grey-looking mushrooms. My polpette della nonna (meatballs) consisted of more firm, dry, underseasoned mince in – you’ve guessed it – yet another serving of the universal tomato/mushroom/ pea gloop.

Ironically, the walls are decorated with lip-smacking, photo-recipe cards illustrating the making of traditional Italian specialities, lovingly hand-rolled, home-made pastas and the like. They seemed to me to be taunting us from a height with a, “Look! See what you’re missing!”

From squinting at the display unit, I felt I had seen similar cakes in other premises and was for leaving hastily. But, in the interests of research, I can report a ghastly, sugar syrup-soaked chocolate gateau and a cloying, synthetic-tasting banana offering of similar aspect. Both toothsome delights served with clouds of aerosol cream.

What was I doing even thinking of eating here? Why, I read a glowing review. Which only goes to show how unreliable many reviews are – except the Sunday Herald’s, of course.