Urban Angel (Hanover Street), Edinburgh - Restaurants in Edinburgh | s1play.com

Urban Angel

Review published on 18/10/2004 © Sunday Herald

Hanover Street in Edinburgh is becoming something of a hang-out for the green-leaning, healthy living, ethical foodie and as it’s prime city centre real estate, you can see that people of this persuasion are moving up in the world. We used to get relegated to lower rent premises in scruffier, more peripheral shopping parades.

One enduring attraction is the long-established Hanover Health Foods down the road, which is the best and most informed place to buy food supplements in the city.

But obviously, you can’t live on vitamin C tablets and sunflower seeds, so heading down the way, you’ve got Henderson’s, that veteran vegetarian restaurant and takeaway food shop. And now across the road from that at number 121, there’s Urban Angel – hybrid takeaway and restaurant.

The entrance area of Urban Angel has had a makeover leaving it looking more like a health-conscious urban oasis for stressed metropolitan types than the usual nasty (and not especially cheap) takeaway sandwich bars that dot such high footfall streets.

It opens at 8am and last orders are at 10pm (except for Sundays) so it seems intent on being a versatile destination servicing a multitude of food needs. Its website says ‘Fair Trade, Free Range, Organic, Local Sourcing’ which rings all the right bells, although it would be good to know to which items these guiding principles extend.

It’s hard to see that the blueberries in the tempting brunch offer of blueberry pancakes, for example, are organic or local, let alone fair trade and they certainly aren’t free range. The maple syrup served alongside might well be organic and can pretty well qualify as wild. You would probably eat this dish happily anyway, but a little more clarity wouldn’t go amiss. Then you’d feel assured that the four goals mentioned above represented earnest intention wherever possible, rather than marketing spin.

And there is the odd aberration that gives you pause to think how well Urban Angel understands its own principles. Irn-Bru sits uneasily alongside organic sparkling elderflower cordial, Neal’s Yard tea and Divine hot chocolate.

My overall take on Urban Angel though is that it is a jolly useful place to have city centre, more home cooking than chef cooking, attractively flexible in that you can eat a lot or a little, and fairly priced. The range is extensive, spanning tapas, salads and sandwiches, proper main courses, voluptuous puds and lots of daily specials, the latter accommodatingly available in two sizes.

There are plenty of nice ideas, like breakfastime banana pancakes with honeycomb and Greek yogurt. What we had was a mixed bag.

The star dish was a tapas of exceptional char-grilled belly of pork with a great fennel seed-crusted crackling. Thumbs up too for a melting lamb shank in a nice natural gravy served with celeriac mash. Decent bruschetta with melted gorgonzola and roasted cherry tomatoes on top with a capable home made chutney wasn’t clever, but it was pleasing.

Tomato and goat cheese tart was let down by poor puff pastry and it wasn’t adequately heated through. The strips of beef in a stir fry were too thick and the overall flavour was sweet and indeterminate rather than aromatic.

The Fair Trade brownie was also miles to sweet for my taste and the walnuts in it would benefit from a light pre-toasting. Coconut tart was nice and fresh but fit to sink a ship.

Even so, I’m looking forward to eating here again.

© Sunday Herald

Worthy but not enough wow

Review published on 14/09/2009 © Sunday Herald

As seems to be the case with Edinburgh eateries, I was slow off the mark in discovering Urban Angel – by the time I’d ventured down the steps into the basement Hanover Street premises the company had already branched out into a sister venture on Forth Street.

If Henderson’s restaurant just across the road reflects the 1960s and a vegetarian, slightly hippy, sandal-wearing era of socially aware eating, then Urban Angel is the chic 21st-century equivalent.

Its company philosophy encompasses fair trade, organic seasonal ingredients, local produce and all the other buzzwords of today’s eco-conscious consumer. The company branding is sleek, modern and yet slightly whimsical. The header design on the website (which comes complete with tweeting birds and outdoor sounds) feels like a cross between Ben & Jerry’s TV advertising campaigns and the Edinburgh International Festival toile design by Timorous Beasties. It’s enough to make a hack slightly cynical.

For some reason I tend to consider Urban Angel as a bolthole for afternoon coffee and cake during a stressful shopping trip or a place for meeting friends, not a dinner venue, though I know from others it’s a popular evening spot. Perhaps it’s something to do with the flagstone floors and absence of soft furnishings that give the place an uncluttered feel, somehow more appropriate in a café than in a restaurant where you might want something a little more cosy.

It was definitely proper food on the cards last week when a friend and I blew in after work, escaping from the driving wind and rain that indicated all too clearly that summer was over and autumn had arrived with a vengeance. Fuelling up before the next Festival performance, comfort food seemed like just the thing – if it also happened to be good for us, the environment and local producers then so much the better.

Bypassing the more serious sounding cuts of meat, I went for the spiced organic lamb meatballs with fresh coriander mash from the regular menu. My friend, meanwhile, took the cep and chanterelle mushroom risotto from the specials board. This was warming and hearty and richly flavoured – just the thing for a blustery evening. The meatballs, served in tomato ragu topped off with roasted cherry tomatoes still on the vine, fulfilled a similar function, though it could have done with being a bit spicier for my taste.

Following a couple of glasses of red wine from the house wine list (at least one, the Ormer Bay, was Fairtrade), we progressed to dessert.

This turned out to be a bit of a mistake. It would have been fine had we ordered a portion of the baked vanilla cheesecake (one of my afternoon coffee favourites) and a couple of forks. Instead we also went for the raspberry tart. It turned out to be a substantial looking thing when it arrived, but it was the cheesecake that was huge. The accompanying scoop of melon sorbet (our choice) was very, well, melony, though it didn’t contribute much. The cheesecake was as good as ever, if you’re a fan of rich, baked stuff rather than the anaemic, overly sweet, uncooked variety.

The raspberry tart was less exciting, though the constituent elements were all perfectly decent; crisp pastry, delicate crème patissiere and plump, fresh raspberries (presumably organic and locally produced too). We managed no more than half of each before reluctantly conceding defeat and venturing out into the squall – fortified, though not perhaps entirely wowed.