Edinburgh Food Studio
158 Dalkeith Rd, Edinburgh
0131 258 0758
Brunch/lunch £22-30; dinner £50
Food rating 10/10
I was always intrigued by the idea of Edinburgh Studio, a crowd funded food research hub and restaurant. Young and creative, at the cutting edge of the discussions around modern gastronomy, I hadn’t really taken in that it hosted themed food evenings with visiting, often from countries as diverse as Latvia, Chile, and Malaysia. So when I first turned up, I stumbled upon a rather illuminating Hungarian evening; good food, truly educational.
But the original approach, although fascinating, was like playing Roulette in its randomness, except that your chances were always good because every guest chef was knowledgeably selected. Now the studio is operating more like a conventional restaurant, open five days a week for brunch and lunch, offering a set tasting menu for dinner, featuring highlights such as North Uist crab, Barra cockles and Luing beef, aged on the bone for eight weeks, and homemade kombucha. The Studio’s energetic founders, Ben Reade and Sashana Souza Zanella, have brought in an immensely able head chef, James Murray, whose CV includes Michelin-starred Nur in Hong Kong, and Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir Aux Quat’ Saisons.
I was curious to taste the change, but wasn’t quite up for the £50, seven-course tasting menu without dipping my toe in the water first, so we’re holed up here for brunch while rain lashes down outside, in sight of the kitchen, which looks to be a happy, civilised place, no histrionics.
When we start tasting, we’re gently bobbing on wave after wave of edible wonderfulness, starting with bread from the Company Bakery, an arms-length offshoot of the studio out of the old Crawfords Biscuit factory in Bonnington. Sourdough, naturally, with a portion of the flour freshly milled daily, I can honestly say that this is bread as good as that baked at De Superette in Ghent, Belgium, to date the best sourdough I have been privileged to taste. The studio serves it with its own whipped butter made from ripened cream. Left alone with this bread and butter, you wouldn’t hear a cheep out of me, just gurgles of delight.
But now the procession of other lovely things commences. Slivers of cured, silvery-skinned fillet of Pittenweem mackerel and lightly fermented white turnip, dressed in smoked oil, dill, and just a dab or two of yogurt. Delicate, clean and healthy in a Japanese sort of way, it’s accompanied by the Company’s amazing rye, granary bread, sweet with seeds, and toasted. There’s more inherent taste in these crusts than in caviar.
Tortilla? I make it at home; mine isn’t exciting. But this one is at another level, the orange organic egg yolks still runny in the middle, floury potatoes- clearly some old, worthwhile variety- with the onions sweated down until they’re sweet and yielding. Here’s the warm Arbroath smoky, moistened by a fish stock lightly enriched and frothy with cream, quickly fried purple sprouting broccoli with curls of salty, velvety cured egg yolk grated on top. We drift on to the scrambled egg with girolles, chanterelles if you prefer that name. The eggs are like soft curds, held in an emulsion; the wild mushrooms are small, almost fruity like apricots; again the sourdough toast is sublime. If Elizabeth David was still with us, I’m sure this simple, perfect dish would meet her exacting standards.
Kofta are astonishing, the meat from a nine-year old cow, aged with care, finely minced. Peppery, they taste like the very finest beef dripping, and the aioli- made with black pepper oil and roasted black garlic is another marvel. Fingers of fermented cucumber bring a cool note to contrast with the peppercorn heat.
There’s a change to dessert: ‘baked cream, mirabelle and oats’. The fruit is turgid East Lothian organic cherries instead of those little yellow plums; I can live with that. The cream, light and foamy, is scented with meadowsweet, which has enveloping warmth, a bit like tonka bean, but with a herbal background, not unlike angelica. The wavy tuiles take me back to Anzac biscuits. Crushed cobnuts bring their new season’s juicy crunch to the plate while the cherries spatter the proceedings with purple. You can sign me up for dinner right now. Edinburgh Food Studio is sensational.
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