Review: Six by Nico, 97 Hanover St, Edinburgh

Food rating 7/10

From the never-ending contemporary debate around nutrition many intriguing strands of thought emerge. One is that we should eat as many different, varied ingredients as possible because this will promote diversity in our micro-biome, the colonies of bacteria in our gut that play a strategic role in health. On paper, Nico Simeone’s menus fit that bill. A six-course taster menu organised around a different theme every six weeks, each dish packed with multiple ingredients; his Six by Nico concept.

My first experience of this formula in his Glasgow restaurant didn’t work for me, its theme being "The Chippie". Six courses of fried food? That’s over the top if you ask me. Catching up with another Six by Nico menu in Edinburgh I find it serving up another dose of nostalgia influenced by the science lab "modernism" of chefs like Heston Blumenthal: "Cooking Wonka".

"Taking inspiration from the legendary innovator and original dreamer of dreams, this six-course tasting menu will take guests on a scrumdiddlyumptious sensory journey to a world of pure imagination. Beginning with a reverse cheese board and ending with our very own Six By Nico bar, prepare to step into the mind of this cunning creator, where everything is not as it seems."

This regression-to-childhood package evidently has wide appeal; the restaurant is choc-a-bloc with customers, but I sense the spirit of the sorcerer’s apprentice writ large. Diners are allotted their place as a passive audience, primed to thrill in wonderment at the procession of dainty dishes set before them. I’d prefer to be an active grown-up, allowed to make my own choices.

But then the "reverse cheeseboard" appears, which by Nico standards is uncharacteristically simple. Hexagonal wafers (black, apparently from squid ink, although they look like charcoal wafers to me) are topped with concentric circles of whipped Gorgonzola (dubbed Royale), which is mysteriously yellow, matchsticks of green apple, "fizzy grapes" (prickly and weird). They come with a bottle of celery and apple gazpacho, which, we all agree, is really excellent, an engagingly bracing, tangy tonic that primes the taste buds.

Beetroot "Dib Dab" amounts to a bright, colourful throng that includes a green-dusted, lemony lollipop on a stick, beetroot "sherbet" dust, pastel shades of heritage beetroot, candied nuts, magenta-bright pickled quail egg, on a very decent mackerel Gribiche. Over-elaborate? Yes, but fun nevertheless. The same can’t be said for Course Three, sliced duck breast, which is served on top of over-peppery duck parfait, with a blueberry meringue, breaded duck leg bonbon, some gel (possibly apple), pink roe (presumably salmon) and green apple slices, all inside a jam jar. The prevailing colour is a bilious, bruised puce. Here’s a dish that needs radically simplified, stripped of its silliness, then served on a plate.

Along comes the cod BlackJack, a creditable squid risotto, a respectable bit of fish, and ace miniature fishcake marred by what appears to be a raw cabbage or cauliflower crumble, cloying caper and raisin and bossy liquorice sauces.

I finally lose heart with the "Chocolate River", a traffic pile-up on a plate. Pallid chicken breast, a chocolate-brown Mexican mole sauce made with Poblano chillies that tastes great but is smeared on the plate like skid marks, popcorn that resembles Butterkist yet tastes of chorizo, oddly sweet black olives, something lemony and soft that could be fregola pasta, green dust (possibly herbs?) and a salmon-pink profiterole that tastes of, well, nothing much. It’s another strange, confused plate where redundant, ill-advised elements spoil the good ones. There are roughly seven component parts to this dish, each with its own sub-set of secondary components. The madcap inventor and food technologist has elbowed out the chef.

Plastic squeeze bottles must have been working overtime to plate up the "Wonka Bar" – a sort of deconstructed peanut butter cheesecake, nicely tart cherry jelly, flanked by sickly sweet amarena cherries, and chocolate "soil" – a liquidy, squirty dessert not without merits but perhaps best suited to someone having trouble with dentures.

Still, at £28 for six courses lots of people will be filled with glee by Nico’s formula, its novelty, its multiple talking points. I’m just not one of them.