Ocean Terminal, Edinburgh 0131 555 2646 Style: Dressing up for the movies Food: Modern European Price: £16 for two courses Wheelchair access: Yes I've come to the Sky Bar and Restaurant straight from teaching a class of journalism students about the fine art of reviewing. Today's theme was the critic as egotist and our study aid, inevitably, was Michael Winner. The self-obsessed film director-turned-restaurant writer is enough to put anyone off their food, but tonight I'm intrigued to know if my small party - Archie, 11, Jane, older - can match him for starry name-dropping.

Ocean Terminal, Edinburgh 0131 555 2646
Style: Dressing up for the movies Food: Modern European Price: £16 for two courses Wheelchair access: Yes

I've come to the Sky Bar and Restaurant straight from teaching a class of journalism students about the fine art of reviewing. Today's theme was the critic as egotist and our study aid, inevitably, was Michael Winner. The self-obsessed film director-turned-restaurant writer is enough to put anyone off their food, but tonight I'm intrigued to know if my small party - Archie, 11, Jane, older - can match him for starry name-dropping.

In last week's review he worked in a reference to Michael Caine, his ex-girlfriend's friendship with Catherine Zeta-Jones, Marlon Brando and a joke that had been told by the "splendid musician" Chris Rea.

Surely we can do better than that, I challenge my company as we look over the menus in a restaurant that is, after all, on a site formerly occupied by Zinc, a place run by Terence Conran. Of course, they say; only yesterday they ran into playwright Jo Clifford (Great Expectations, Losing Venice), in the supermarket and had had a nice chat. Impressed? I think you are.

That's just the start of a long and glamorous list of our famous friends, but by this time Archie has been distracted by the widescreen TV on the opposite wall. He's pretending the Sky Sports newsreader has been lip-synched with Amy Winehouse's Valerie playing over the speakers, resulting in the most unlikely pop video. "Mark Ronson must have left the studio laughing," he says, imagining the producer's Machiavellian plot to steal the voice of Amy Winehouse and take all the credit on MTV.

So we're not doing badly: Conran, Clifford, Ronson and Winehouse, even if only one of them is actually our friend. But wait a minute. Don't we have a star in our own midst? Indeed, this is the week Archie will give his rendition of a skater boy in the St Mary's Primary staging of High School Musical. Tomorrow is the dress rehearsal and, by the time you read this, the show will have become a legendary triumph, eclipsing memories of last week's sell-out professional production at the Edinburgh Playhouse ("Better than the film, but still rubbish," is Archie's damning verdict. "One of the actors couldn't even sing.") Michael Winner eat your heart out (now, that would make an interesting review). So, as the great man said only last Sunday - and I'm not making this up - "This is meant to be a food column, Michael, Did you eat?"

So, the thing about the Sky Bar and Restaurant is that, although unexceptional, it's a good deal better than you'd expect to find in a shopping mall where the clientele are en route to the Vue cinema, heading for the QE2 or rounding off a day hunting for bargains in Gap.

Our friendly and amenable waitress, for example, is quick to check if the chef can rustle up a tomato sauce less spicy than the one advertised for Archie's penne. The chef, somewhere behind the gleaming chrome of the large open kitchen, duly obliges. That the pasta is beyond al dente doesn't stop him wolfing it down, strands of mozzarella and all. After an enormous chunk of deep-fried brie, as succulent as it is artery busting, I go for a well-judged roast pumpkin risotto, sharpened with the taste of rosemary.

Jane's fish goujon starter is prettily presented on a black slate but has little taste, while her Moroccan lamb tagine, served with cous cous, has lots of tender meat on the bone, served in an interesting if a tad cloying sauce tinged with apricot. The side order of green vegetables is crisply cooked and the forte is the puddings: a meltingly chewy brownie in a chocolate sauce spiced with ginger, particularly good.

Chief disadvantage, especially on a quiet Monday night, is the sheer size of the restaurant. Once you lose the great daytime views across the Firth of Forth, it's a big chilly box of a place with no sense of intimacy. Jane snuggles up to the cushions on the bench along one wall to fend off the drafts, but we're not inclined to linger once the meal is done.

However well it does at countering your expectations, it's still a restaurant in a shopping mall, better suited to a lunchtime treat than a slap-up dinner.