Taste of Edinburgh

T and I went along to Taste of Edinburgh yesterday. I was a bit annoyed to find out it was in Inverleith Park, as the last couple of years it's been in the Meadows, which is about 5 minutes walk from my flat. Now we have to get a bus! To add to the fun, there was a cycling event which had shut off half the city centre, so the bus took twice as long as it should have.

Anyway, my main purpose of going (apart from eating more food than I should) was to scope out some of the restaurants with an eye to persuading my parents that they should take me out somewhere fancy for dinner when I graduate in July. Of the restaurants there, I quite fancied Forth Floor at Harvey Nichols, and Number One, Princes Street.

We began by wasting loads of our money on some Kopparbergs. I love a bit of pear cider, and was absolutely gasping for drink after 40 minutes on an airless bus in the heat, but £4 is way too much. I made sure I got my money's worth of the free ice. We ambled round a bit, and saw a guy demonstrating a mould that could make heart shaped sushi rolls. I tried a apple and cinnamon chocolate, which was a bit fudgey and chewy for my liking. There were 50 or so produce stalls as well as the miniaturised restaurants, so it was fun checking out some of them. We got some madeleines from the Bonne Maman stall, a free Tanqueray G&T, and then spent ages playing with a frying pan with a quick release handle.

Glazed Pork Belly with Braised Apple & Scallop with Stuffed Trotter

After we'd wandered round the whole site, it was time to crack on with the food. We ate quite a lot, as on a couple of occasions the staff forgot to ask for payment, so we had extra vouchers to spend! Yay! Here's a list of what we ate:

• Slowly cooked lamb shoulder with aubergine caviar, seasonal ratatouille, olive and lamb jus
• Smoked chicken roulade - with avocado puree, tomato salsa and onion seed crisp
• Honey and five-spiced, glazed belly pork with braised apple
• Seared scallop - with stuffed trotter and salsify puree
• Roast suckling pig with caramelised onion mash, apple and sage compote and meat juices
• Chocolate torte with cream
• Scottish berry Pavlova with whisky cream
• Dark chocolate moelleux with avocado cream (only tried a small sample of the moelleux, no avocado cream)
  
• Cannolo with sheep ricotta cream and candied peel
• White peach Bellinis
  

I would love to tell you how it all tasted. I really would. Unfortunately, I chose this weekend to come down with a stinking cold. So I have no sense of taste at all. In a way, it was interesting, as I judged the food purely on texture and mouthfeel. I found the crispy trotters went well with the soft scallop, but the dish was marred by the chilled salsa on top. The suckling pig also suffered from hot food being chilled by a cold sauce. T, who still had a sense of taste, enjoyed the glazed pork belly, and was pleasantly surprised by the aubergine caviar (usually he will do almost anything to avoid aubergine, but described the puree as "bearable"). He was also very enamoured by the chocolate torte. I scored a tiny personal victory when I persuaded him to try the tiniest bit of scallop. I think his previous exposure to seafood is mainly based around prawn crackers and sesame toast.

Cannolo

We didn't really take much interest in the cookery demos, mainly because unless you are right at the front you can't see anything. However, we managed to snag seats in the front row of Mat Follas, cooking sausage and beans. Oh yeh. The secret ingredient was anchovy paste. The crowd were allowed to sample the sauce before and after the paste was added, and even me, with my minimal sense of taste could tell the difference. Umami indeed (is it just me that thinks umami sounds like something from Shooting Stars? Eranu.)

Berry Pavlova with Whisky Cream

T and I had a great evening out, and although it was a tad expensive (we got through about £60 including tickets) we got to sample food from restaurants we couldn't normally afford to visit. We'd also pay the best part of £60 just to go to Pizza Express once you add in wine and service, so if you look at it as dinner out rather than a "festival" then it's not too bad value. It's also close to my ideal eating experience: lots of tasting plates rather than one large plate. I'd be up for going again next year, although perhaps in a larger group, so we can try more things!

David Bann

It has long been a running joke in my relationship with T that just as he will never get me to go McDonalds, he will never eat at David Bann's.

Last night T and I ventured to David Bann's for a vegetarian dinner.

I am still not going to McDonalds though.

Unlike many vegetarian restaurants, David Bann looks pretty classy. There are no ethnic knick-knacks or waitresses wearing clogs and some knitted trousers from Thailand. While I am partial to the odd bout of hippyness, I am also partial to going to fancy restaurants.

I started off with the Thai fritters, while T had leek and tomato tartlet. The Thai fritters had smoked tofu in, and I wanted to see if a vegetarian chef could make tofu taste good! They were nicely crispy, but the spicyness of them overwhelmed the peas and ginger. The mango chutney was also a bit less flavourful than I would have hoped. These were minor criticisms though, and T enjoyed the forkful I sent his way. T seemed to enjoy the tartlet too, leaving only a few crumbs on the plate.

Next up T had mushroom and cashew curry, with rice fritters. Generally it lived up to his high curry standards, but he was a little disappointed that it had more of a focus on the cashew than the mushroom. I had the chilli with smoked cheese and chocolate coriander sauce, served in a wrap. The chilli was very rich, and I didn't make it through the whole dish. The smoked cheese was dotted throughout the wrap, which meant every other mouthful had a delicious creamy element to it. The chocolate and coriander was not that discernable, and on the whole I think I could recreate this pretty well at home. However, the real star of this dish was the guacamole. It had just the right amount of lime and chilli, so the flavour was deliciously bright and zingy. Even though I couldn't finish some of the bean chilli, I made sure every scrap of guacamole was devoured!

We finished our meal with coffee and desserts. I had the cinnamon apple fritter with ginger ice cream. The spicing was a little strong, although the soft apple worked nicely with the crispy batter, and the hot fritters were contrasted against the ice cream. T's ice cream was served on tiny wafers, and the range of flavours to choose from was very varied.

I think we were both pleasantly surprised about how the menu was designed so that meat was not obviously missing. I don't mind vegetarian food, although T is a hardened carnivore, so it was a very unusual experience for him. Although the final bill was fairly expensive once wine and service had been added in, if the restaurant had served meat I think you would looking at £17-20 for a main course instead of £10-12. In this respect, we got a quality of cooking and service that you would normally expect to pay much more for.

If T ever recovers from eating vegetarian food (and even, dare I say, enjoying it) then we'll definitely be back one day.

The Tower Restaurant

Today I went to the Tower Restaurant for lunch. I've wanted to go for a long time, and they had a special lunch menu for a student friendly £12.95.

The restaurant itself was very well laid out, on the 5th floor of the Museum of Scotland. The view north over the roofs of Chamber Street and to the south face of the castle was spectacular, and watching the sun set* behind the castle was a real treat. I've seen this before from some of the tutorial rooms in the David Hume Tower, but this was a much more comfortable surrounding.

The choice of food was quite limited seeing we could only afford to stick to the set menu. The starters included spinach and apple soup, egg salad with lyonnaise sauce, and boudin of fish with lentil salad. I went for the boudin. A boudin is a blood sausage, so basically minced meat held together with blood, that is boiled in a skin, then sliced and served hot or cold. I was intrigued by the prospect of this done with fish. It was fairly tasty, and had I made it myself I would have been pleased. However, it was blander than I would have liked (especially since the waiter had told us it had salmon as the main ingredient) and the lentils were similarly unispiring. It was also surprisingly hard to eat, as the minced fish fell apart on the fork and the puy lentils were too tough to spear. Googling returns very few results for fish boudin, so although it was interesting, I don't think delicate fish works well in a boiled sausage, which should be made from a more robust meat. The others who tried the boudin seemed similarly puzzled by the dish. One of us had the soup, and said it was surprisingly filling. The starters also came with a bread selection, featuring a delicious date bread, and a fairly ordinary pesto foccacia.

The choice for the main course were tagliatelle with tarragon pistou, shellfish bisque with a crab mayonnaise crouton, and spicy pork belly with beans and cabbage. Three of us got the pork, someone else got the bisque and two of the others got the tagliatelle. The pork was three small slices of belly meat, resting on a bed of beans and stewed cabbage. On top was a perfect triangle of crackling. Given that I had paid approximately £8 for this dish, I was pleased with what I had got, although if the portions for the "real" menu (main courses priced between £15-25) were similarly stingy I would perhaps be slightly peeved. Again, while the food was good, it wasn't the greatest food ever, and given the prices for those not on the special set menu, I would have expected more. The shellfish bisque apparently "smelled like Sri Lanka" and had a good flavour of shellfish, although it had a tomato rather than cream base. Again the portion was fairly small and would have been a starter in many other restaurants. The tagliatelle was an enigma, with one friend describing it as filling, but the other being rather disappointed with the portion size as well as the taste.

The desert menu sounded good, and I was particularly intrested in the "chocolate five ways", which included chocolate mousse, chocolate glaze, chocolate biscuit, chocolate sorbet and chocolate creme brulee. However, at £6.50 a go and most of us in 5 figures of debt, we gave it a miss.

We had a bottle of house white and house red. Both were nice but not anything special. The service was also very slow, particularly considering there were only two other tables. The bottles of wine were placed on another table, and glasses not topped up often enough. This meant that at the end of the meal we had half a bottle left that we had to either down or let go to waste. I would hope that the service in the evening would be quicker, especially since there is a pre-theatre menu. It took us over 2 hours to have two courses, and we waited a long time for our orders to be taken as well inbetween courses.

Overall, I would recommend the Tower for the atmosphere, especially if you get the special set menu and have some money to spend on some good wine. Although the food was good considering we paid under £13 per head, (wine took the bill to £20 each) I would have expected much more from the main menu. If I was a restauranteur, I would consider the set menu a showcase for my chef's skills, and use it as a advertisement for the full price menu. Based on what I saw today, I would return for lunch, but probably not for a full meal (unless someone else was paying!) The Tower was on the short list for graduation dinner with my parents, but I think I would prefer somewhere with more focus on the food and less reliance on a stunning view to carry it.

*sunset over lunch? We had a late lunch and it gets dark at 4pm here in the frozen north.