I preface this review by acknowledging that I am not the target audience for Enzo, Edinburgh's new Italian restaurant.
I want Scotland to have more eateries like you get in Italy, serving regional dishes in unpretentious, simple surroundings. In Italy, as a general rule, the fancier a restaurant looks, the less authentic the food is. What I love about Italian food is its unfussiness, its simple goodness, its fidelity to local gastronomic tradition. Italian cooking is quite distinct from French restaurant cuisine, which is predicated on the kitchen brigade, an almost military operation working away to elaborate ingredients, all the time observing fine dining principles set down by hallowed chefs, Escoffier and La Careme.
On Enzo's website, you can examine the credentials of the team involved. The head chef hails from white truffle country - Alba, in Piedmont - a promising sign. His CV also details experience in Monte Carlo, St Tropez, Nice, and latterly at the Ritz in London. He cites Escoffier as a big influence on his approach. Other members of the team quote their extensive global experience of the hospitality trade and express their desire to bring something "new and cool" to Edinburgh. The goal at Enzo's, it appears, is "reigniting the style bar category". I wish this phrase didn't make me old and cynical.
Regular readers know that I am not a fan of Edinburgh Quartermile, where Enzo has set up shop, a development that feels irredeemably corporate, in a 1980s, yuppie, city of London financial district way. The tinted glass and steel of its luxury flats and offices look brash and arrogant against the weathered stone of the old Royal Infirmary, and the area feels dead. A new, monthly "artisan" market (yep, another of those) may be an attempt to animate it, but if you ask me, it's an uphill struggle.
Enzo's interior is a wintry Wall Street landscape of mercury grey decor, hard surfaces, noisy, cold air conditioning, and repetitive music that bosses its way into your consciousness, like a child kicking the back of your seat. Perhaps plates are deemed to be unfashionably square here, so the food either comes in a bowl, or on a slate. Restaurateurs please note: slates are dated, slates are over, slates are impractical. They are heavy to carry; liquids drip off them; you can't heat them hot enough to keep food warm.
The slate thing at Enzo flags up a distorting focus on presentation, and other fine dining foibles - serving ingredients three ways, for example - intrude on otherwise better than average cooking. Tuna arrived as a tartare, carpaccio, and mi-cuit (seared exterior, raw middle) on a slate (propped up, bizarrely, on a cube of white bread), upon a glass plate. The tartare was the best bit, the rest bland. Rabbit leg, beautifully roasted, with a stewy Ligurian sauce with black olives and pine kernels, came with memorable rosemary roasted potatoes, but the minute you tried to cut the leg, everything else slid off the slate. More rustic, a tart of fondant red onion in a wonderful Parmesan fondue, sharpened by a sour-sweet balsamic reduction, was only let down by the indifferent quality of its pastry. Tagliolini "made with 30 egg yolks" (per batch, I assume) was very definitely overcooked, its starch fusing the noodles together under a meaty ragù that vied for attention with the richness of the egg.
At dessert, the obsession with slates reached its pinnacle of daftness with a panna cotta and strawberry coulis slipping and sliding upon one. What a visual mismatch, the clunky slate against the vulnerable panna cotta. And what a pity too: the panna cotta was first rate, even if the coulis was over sweet. Enzo also served a creditable tiramisù, a much abused confection. It even came close to my own cherished recipe, that is, stiff with mascarpone and egg rather than foamy with cream.
If you are an Italian wine buff, be warned, the selection is limited; other wine growing regions are more represented. But Enzo's being a style bar, there are cocktails a plenty, just the ticket, if you want to hang around, looking cool, while quaffing a Bellini or a Negroni.
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