Joanna Blythman: Henderson's Vegan, Edinburgh

Lunch/Dinner £10-£25

Food rating 4.5/10

KERRY McCarthy MP, the shadow secretary for environment, food and rural affairs at Westminster, has put the cat amongst the pigeons, or rather the pigeon amongst the cats, by telling a vegan magazine that meat-eating should come with tobacco-style warnings. I don’t subscribe to the “all meat is murder” mantra, but it’s refreshing to think that a minister of agriculture might actually challenge Defra’s knee-jerk support for factory farming in its various inhumane and environmentally ruinous manifestations.

From a more practical eating out point of view, I welcome any breath of fresh air that helps shift the heavy aroma of charred animal flesh that threatens to suffocate the Scottish restaurant scene. Name me a truly vegetable-centric restaurant in Scotland that doesn’t pad out its dishes with heaps of nutritionally near-to-useless carbohydrates, or heavily processed vegan staples, such as soya. We’re way behind Ireland here. Vegetarian Café Paradiso in Cork is a legend, and last month I ate the most sensational salads at the omnivore Momo restaurant in Waterford, which uses stunning organic seasonal veg from the gardens of the inspiring Grow It Yourself (GIY) movement. Scotland urgently needs to catch up.

Even as an omnivore I frequently crave a vegetable-dense meal. If you go with the flow of our modern food "culture" you just won’t get enough green plant food, so the opportunity to recharge the system with interesting vegetable cooking is, to me at least, quite irresistible. Hence the spring in my step as I set off, accompanied by my old vegetarian, near vegan friend, to sample the menu at Henderson’s new vegan restaurant in Edinburgh, round the corner from the veteran, self-service bistro.

It’s a cute little restaurant with soothing sylvan decor, but the menu is comatose, as if the person who conceived of it could barely be bothered. The term “organic” doesn’t appear on the menu, so I assume that the vegetables aren’t organically grown, and the word dull doesn’t do justice to the starters. I mean, do you get lit up by the thought of “hummus, oatcakes, and veg sticks” at £4.70, surely a can’t-be-bothered option that anyone could rustle up? Or a beanburger at £9.50? Scouring the starters we discounted the Greek salad (boring, and with incongruous tofu replacing the customary feta), the avocado pasta salad (unimaginative, and who likes cold wholemeal pasta?) and dismissed the nachos because they came with vegan “cheese” (shudder). That left two salads. One – blueberry and walnut – was about as wrong-headed a salad as you can get, a lazy heap of aggressively peppery rocket covering vapid berries, rancid, broken-up nuts, and fibrous cold parsnips that had all the allure of sawdust, dripping with “olive oil and balsamic reduction”, which tasted more like watery caramel. By contrast, it was worth exercising the jaw for the wilted kale salad. With its chilli chickpea “croutons”, “medley of crunchy seeds” (poppy, sunflower and pumpkin), and sesame and maple syrup vinaigrette, it was lip-smacking by comparison.

We flirted with the chickpea and spinach pancake until we spotted that it included another dairy lookalike imposter, vegan “mozzarella”. Mamma mia! The safer bet of homemade haggis turned out to be a nicely spiced, highly palatable mix of kidney beans, pinhead oats, lentils, and mushroom, squashed by a coarse, sticky pile of mashed potato with thready swede, crowned outlandishly with three blueberries, one raspberry, and more rocket. The haggis sat in “red wine gravy” that tasted more like a salty, packet soup with dried herbs in it. Cashew, smoked tofu, lemongrass and coconut “fritters” formed two hulking, solid balls with an unidentifiable sour tang, flanked by a sharp “satay” sauce that seemed light on nuts and aromatics, and big on tomato.

We quickly gave up on dessert: a slab of dense, arid chocolate sponge with cloying chocolate topping strewn with low-grade broken cashews and un-skinned hazelnuts, and a chilling pumpkin pie, supercharged with cinnamon on an under-baked, floury base.

Vegans are, I suspect, just so happy to find a restaurant that eschews animal foods that they are probably not the most critical, discerning customers. But surely they deserve better than this, a routine ticking of the vegan box?