August_21
135 Comiston Road, Edinburgh
0131 629 4044
Lunch/Dinner: £6-£35
Food rating: 6/10
I HAVE long ignored official “healthy eating” advice to reduce salt. It seems to me that excess salt is only a hazard if you live on processed food, which I don’t. And I feel vindicated now that science is challenging the low salt doctrine. In 2014, a major review concluded that we have been fixating on the wrong white crystals. “Clinicians should shift focus away from salt and focus greater attention to the likely more consequential food additive: sugar,” it concluded. Last year, a major study of 100,000 people found that those who followed lower salt intake guidelines actually had more heart trouble than those who didn’t. I rest my case.
On the gastronomic front, I believe that the judicious, appropriate use of salt is a key skill for any chef or cook, but quite often in restaurants I find that food has been inadequately salted, at least for my taste buds. Whether this is done through diligent compliance with the anti-salt mantra, or simply out of laziness, I can’t say. Write in if you disagree, but slapping a bit of meat on a grill without either marinading it, or pre-seasoning it with salt and pepper, is a job half done.
Seasoning is very subjective, of course, so all I can say is that the taste palate regulating the cooking at Edinburgh’s August_ 21 diverges from my own. I find it bland, short on salt and everything else in the way of herb and spices.
I can see the appeal of this neighbourhood café-restaurant in well-heeled Morningside. The menu, with its dash of foraging here and there, superficially looks contemporary, and if you visit for lunch, brunch or coffee, you might come away with that impression. Yet the evening menu, once you strip away trendy trappings, like kale and squash, is pretty conventional in its thinking: a centre-piece of fish/meat protein; potato in some form; more or less the same vegetables on each dish. There’s predictable carrot and coriander soup (isn’t there always, everywhere?), and risotto for the vegetarians. Unless you ask, you don’t know whether your salmon or venison is wild or farmed, your duck free-range or factory farmed.
Venison carpaccio, supple and soft, worked well with smoked baby beets, safe-bet horseradish, and the fruity, balsamic presence of black garlic. Roast vegetable crisps – carrot, parsnip, cavalo nero – only complicated it and detracted from its cleanness. It needed salt. In another starter, chanterelle mushrooms – the weedy, fragrance-free winter sort – lay limp in cream that had flooded the soggy toast below. Salt, and some fresh herbs, might have distracted from the flavour void. Poached egg only added to the runny slump.
Venison loin, pink, tender, but once again, apparently innocent of seasoning, flanked potato Boulangère that had a preponderance of onion and tarragon cooked to khaki. Perversely, this potato was over-salted, while the other accompaniments (including cloying red cabbage, Spartan cauliflower that seemed boiled rather then baked, but otherwise untended). Its “coffee and chocolate sauce” smelt like over-percolated Cona. At £19.50 this dish wasn’t up to scratch.
Another main course of duck breast came with a similar pile-up of vegetables, more chanterelles, and a half-hearted attempt at a fondant potato. Again erratic seasoning was masked by a powerful gravy: orange and bramble.
I could detect no taste or texture of chestnut in the “orange, chocolate, and chestnut torte”. Mousse-like in consistency, insubstantial in size, it reminded me of liquidised Terry’s chocolate orange. Pear, date, and pecan crumble might be more accurately labelled as “pears in sticky toffee sauce”, such is the sugar rush it delivered before you even dipped a spoon in the accompanying custard. Its thin, floury top layer, which looked to be flashed under a grill or browned with a blowtorch, isn’t my idea of a crunchy baked crumble.
August_ 21 is more ambitious than your average suburban eatery, right down to that irritating underscore in its name, yet the cooking is uneven and pretty basic. A bring-your-own-bottle (BYOB) policy lessens the financial blow, but do go with your eyes open. Its evening food prices aren’t what I’d expect of a neighbourhood BYOB.
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