Restaurant of the month

The Gardener’s Cottage, Royal Terrace Gardens, Edinburgh, tel 0131 558 1221

The Gardener’s Cottage is what its name says. What it does not say is that it is a restaurant, one of the most interesting in Edinburgh, which, though not vegetarian, grows its own vegetables and can serve expert vegetarian meals to people who pre-order them. To the rest of us last week it was serving mutton, grouse, and seafood as part of a seven-course dinner compiled from small, delicious dishes of this and that, explained to you one by one by deftly articulate, but by no means pretentious, waitresses before they place it in front of you.

It is a variation on the now rather overworked taster menus you encounter in many an overpriced and sometimes merely irritating restaurant. But, though not cheap, The Gardener’s Cottage is not overpriced. Nor is it irritating, even although it consists of only two long tables, seating a total of twenty-or-so people where we were expected to eat communally without eavesdropping on adjoining conversations.

In every respect, the system works. Placed between two sets of fellow diners last week, we agreed that we had no idea what they were talking about, nor any special curiosity about it, which is more than can be said for many a Pizza Express. Conversation was sustained, without Scottish guffawing, at a moderate level, while LP recordings of Ella Fitzgerald vintage were unobtrusively played in the background.

With only two small rooms, built in 1836 after a design by William Playfair, the cottage forms a tiny part of his master plan for Royal Terrace and its sloping gardens above London Road.  It is a classical product of the Edinburgh enlightenment, so bijou that if people were to eat at separate tables there would be scant space for customers, especially as one of the rooms contains the open-plan kitchen and its two expert chefs, who cook with great subtlety.

Nothing tastes quite how it looks, or looks quite how it tastes. There are tiny, exquisite salad leaves, the odd greengage, superb bread, small slabs of goat’s cheese dressed in something different, slices of fish that could be scallops or scallops that could be fish.

Even after your server’s analytical explanations there is much to discuss or dispute or puzzle over. Though quite rigidly assembled - or so you might like to think - the menu does seem to change, which is all the more remarkable.

The wines, served in good glasses, include an admirable Alsace Riesling, which, being neither decisively sweet nor dry, seemed thoroughly appropriate, indeed just right for such a place. The Gardener's cottage  has been hailed as  a fun restaurant, which also seems about right, though the fun, at least on this occasion, did not get out of hand.
22 September 2014