Rhubarb, Prestonfield House, Priestfield Road, Edinburgh (0131 225 1333). Meal for two, including wine and service, £95.
When the cheeses arrive colder than the wine, you know you're in trouble. When the woman delivering them can no sooner identify the cheeses - it takes two trips back to the kitchen - than wish you a good evening in Mandarin, you can be certain things are awry.
Such are the rare joys of Rhubarb, a new Edinburgh venture from James Thompson, proprietor of the reasonably well-regarded Tower and Witchery restaurants in the Scottish capital. Rhubarb is not exactly bad. It is too well meaning for that. It is more like a student production of Macbeth that strives for great drama but manages only laughs, turning it into a tragedy of an unintentional kind.
The curiosities begin with the setting. Prestonfield House is a 17th-century mansion situated just outside the city centre which, since its recent renovation, now manages to redefine the word camp. There can be no brocade left anywhere in the British Isles: it's all in Prestonfield, alongside every tassel and yard of velvet. The walls of one room are hung with leather flock wallpaper.
Among the entertainments not to be missed at Rhubarb, the wine list stands proud, not so much for the selection of wines - international, extensive and expensive - as for the paragraphs used to describe them. Edinburgh probably had to send out to Glasgow for more adjectives when this was being put together. Wines are a 'debauchery' or 'scrumptious'; they 'yield' and 'relinquish'. In one, 'the empyrean palate is a raucous beano'. No, me neither. Another boasts a 'bacchanalian palate'. (Interesting: Bacchus is the god of wine. Therefore a bacchanalian palate means it, er, tastes of wine.)
It would have helped if they had thought to keep some of the cheaper, more popular whites on that list - like the £20 Alsatian Riesling we chose - in the fridge so they were cold enough to drink. Even my local Oddbins can afford a two-minute chilling machine, but not Rhubarb. Our bottle didn't get down there until deep into our main course. But they do get points for bringing, free of charge, a glass of something already cold enough once those main courses had arrived. By then, sadly, the moment had passed.
The menu has a few linguistic worries of its own. I am still having nightmares about a dish I didn't order described as a 'shank' of sea bass. Was this some devil fish, drawn from the radioactive waters of the Irish Sea where it had sprouted legs? But, for the most part, the food was not so much disturbing as just plain clumsy. The best thing we tried, and it was very good indeed, was a light seafood consomme with button-sized dumplings of white fish. At £4.50 it was also good value. Everything else misfired.
My salad of lamb's tongues and sweetbreads had more than a little of the Garfunkel's salad bar about it, the plate festooned with grated carrot and cherry tomatoes.
In a main course dish of rabbit, the meat came wrapped in a ham which completely overwhelmed the flavour; alongside was an unadvertised and unnecessary lump of cabbage stuffed with what we took to be rabbit confit. My £24.50 fillet of Black Gold beef was good meat underseasoned, on a greasy bacon and potato cake.
By the time it arrived I welcomed my gingerbread and rhubarb creme brulee as if it were a good idea. Which it wasn't. And then there were those frigid cheeses.
And a £95 bill to follow. Oh well.
I suppose they have to pay for that brocade somehow.
