WHEN you open a restaurant, it helps to demonstrate your conviction that you’ll still be there in a few years' time. At the moment, Checkpoint reminds me of one of those shops in faraway places where the proprietor only switches on the lights when a customer comes in. Ok I’m exaggerating, but Checkpoint is the lowest of low-key new arrivals on Edinburgh’s eating out scene.

The premises used to be a Seventh Day Adventist church, and more recently provided a scruffy home for an indie café. The word utilitarian doesn’t do justice to this place, which has all the comfort of a 1960s youth club. Checkpoint would make a made-to-measure set for a film in the kitchen sink realism tradition. A reworked Saturday Night Sunday Morning perhaps. Or it could pass for Cold War Berlin. You half expect to see Michael Caine disappearing downstairs for an Ipcress File assignation with some foreign bloke.

The premises are so dauntingly large, and potentially awkward in shape, as to be a challenge for any entrepreneur. They have even managed to accommodate a shipping container. You can choose to eat in it but we found that invitation resistible, put that down to a combination of claustrophobia and watching the Wire, season two. The lighting struggles to do the job. Coughs and shuffles of other diners you can barely see echo over expanses of floor and bounce off hard surfaces. I’d hazard a guess that this anti-decor scheme, which elevates comfort-free bareness to a design concept, was designed by a man. My main course, an otherwise reasonable breast of smoked grouse was served on a beaten up aluminium baking tray that was testament to the rigours of service in a busy kitchen. With its distressed patina I suppose it could look rather cool to those of a certain mindset. Next thing you know they’ll be selling them as vintage cookware in Oxfam shops, but the only cool I got was from the meat as it chilled on the poorly insulated surface. This might explain Checkpoint’s inclusion in the Times "25 coolest restaurants in Britain" list.

I’m not quite sure who the intended clientele is here. The menu covers all eventualities: breakfast, lunch, dinner, solitary eating, group eating, snacking. Next to us sat two students, nursing a drink and eking out a scone between them while revising notes and behaving like those students portrayed in Inspector Morse and Lewis: articulate, bright, and capable of getting up to all sorts.

Someone in the kitchen here can cook reasonably well. So a potential catastrophe in the making – a vegetable tarte Tatin – was actually quite pleasant with its fondant aubergine, pepper, courgette, and shallots, and its hot lick of harissa yogurt. They weren’t complicated, but the pork and prawn spring rolls, a fragrant surf ‘n' turf mulch in golden filo pastry with a soy dipping sauce sharpened, I’d guess, with rice vinegar, made effortless-to-eat mouthfuls. We were served the first successful slaw I’ve had to eat anywhere, a neat julienne of carrot and beetroot crowned with an airy swirl of goat cheese mousse and a scattering of toasted sesame seeds. I could have eaten a whole bowlful of the clear tomato consommé that came with the megrim sole; the promised cockles didn’t materialise. The fish itself had entered the state of featureless neutrality that follows harbour freshness and precedes pungent oldness. Boring steamed potatoes with the sole had that unmistakable old taste, as did the chips; pre-cooked potatoes go into an abrupt decline.

For dessert, there was a svelte poached cardamom pear with tiny peaks of soft chocolate fudge and alcohol-soaked Griotte cherries, and a hunk of solid chocolate, nut, and raisin pavé, more hewn than sliced, under an amateurish raspberry ripple ice cream with shards of ice in it.

The food at Checkpoint has much more going for it than its Funeral in Berlin threadbareness might suggest. During the festival, it will doubtless be standing room only here. For the time however Checkpoint needs to reach critical mass if it hopes to maintain the more ambitiously fresh items on its menu.

3 Bristo Place. Edinburgh