Chop House Bar And Butchery

15, East Market St, Edinburgh

0131 629 1551

Lunch/Dinner: £20-£60

Food rating: 3/10

JANUARY brings the annual diet of anti-meat, “we’re all going vegan” headlines. It’s a seasonal ritual, belied by hard facts about people’s eating habits. The Vegan Society says that the number of people eschewing all animal foods has spiked by 360 per cent in the last decade; that’s still only 1.05 per cent of the population. Food futurologists habitually pitch lab-grown meat as the alternative that will take our shelves by storm, but year after year, that just doesn’t happen. Fewer than one in five of us is keen to try lab meat and half of us reject the idea outright, according to the latest Harris survey for The Grocer. And fake meat is made by “culturing” stem cells from animals. What self-respecting vegan is going to swallow that?

Those of us not embracing meat avoidance do have an ethical obligation to boycott factory farmed meat and ensure that the meat we eat is reared in a humane, environmentally aware manner. Mystery meat is a no-no. That’s why I’m surprised that the Chop House Bar And Butchery in Edinburgh can be no more substantive by way of provenance than inform us that it cooks “ the very best British beef over open flame in our custom-designed charcoal grill”. Talk about making a virtue out of necessity. Not that the word “Scottish” is any guarantee of quality, but a bare minimum of effort would surely allow Chop House to fill in the sourcing history.

Chop House does, however, make a token effort in the form of a Sunday roast beef dinner that specifies beef from the estimable Hardiesmill farm in the Borders, whose reputation for grass-reared, pure-bred Aberdeen Angus beef goes before it. I have no doubts that Hardiesmill beef is up there with Scotland’s very finest, so it’s a crying shame that Chop House can’t do it justice. Our roast beef was slack, chewy, hard to cut, of indifferent flavour, and wet, as if it had not been allowed to rest. I’m a cook, not a butcher, but the meat was as excessively lean and unrewarding as silverside. It had no cover of fat. For my money, this was a braising cut ill-suited to dry roasting. An unfortunate, one-off, if crucial error of judgement? Sadly not. This tepid plate of horrors also included cabbage so sweet and shiny it bordered on being candied; leathery Yorkshire pudding; partially burnt, mini-carrots that looked like carbonised fingers seen in a Mummy’s tomb; insanely salty roast potatoes; greasy leeks and peas; cloying white sauce with stringy threads of arid horseradish in it; gravy with the faux herbiness and umami I associated with stock cubes. (I blame the spuds and the latter for the subsequent thirst that gripped me for a good eight hours. And that was merely sampling the plate’s contents, not eating it all.)

Neither the cooking level, nor the ingredients at the Chop House earn their ambitious price tag. Trust this lot with a Chateaubriand? No way! Gravy apart, the worst element is the fried offerings, which smell like being down-wind of a chip shop that urgently needs an oil change. Monkfish scampi and crispy squid tasted more of their greasy, whiffy batter than the named species. The fish was worryingly devoid of flavour. I fought the urge to frog-march the chef up the road to Ondine to get a lesson on the art of selecting and deep-frying seafood. But then judging from the BBQ rib, dry and lukewarm, with a warmed-over flavour, missing its promised “sesame crust”, a lesson in barbecuing is in order too.

Our appetites stalled. We wanted to flee from the too closely packed tables and their smelly platefuls. But what of dessert? “Coal roasted apple cheesecake” sounded unwise, especially when our waitress warned us that it was “deconstructed – more like a sundae”. Avoiding the salted caramel fondue with doughnuts and marshmallows – an invitation to Type Two diabetes if ever there was one – we sampled the driest chocolate brownie yet encountered, crowned with “burnt marmalade cream” as sickly as carrot cake frosting.

It’s a long time since I have been so happy to leave a restaurant.