Forth Floor
Telephone: 0131-524 8350
Address: Harvey Nichols, 30-34 St Andrews Square, Edinburgh
Rating: 15/20
Open: Lunch, all week, 12 noon-3pm; dinner, Tues-Sat, 6-10pm (all week in August).
Vintners Rooms
Telephone: 0131-554 6767
Address: The Vaults, 87 Giles Street, Leith
Rating: 17/20
Open: Lunch, Mon-Sat, 12 noon-2pm; dinner, 6-10pm.
The menus at both the Vintners Rooms and Harvey Nichols Forth (as in Firth of) Floor advertise that a 10% discretionary service charge has been added to the bill. Ten per cent? That seems pretty considerate by today's inflated standards. Now, I don't want to get into the rights and wrongs of the service charge, or debate the difference between a service charge and a tip; I simply want to remark that I had always thought that a 12.5% service charge was the norm, and bridle at the greed of some restaurants that slap on 15%. Ten per cent is not only more reasonable in every way, but it doesn't take me 15 minutes of mental arithmetic when I am a glass or two of wine to the good (or bad, depending on your point of view).
The service charge aside, the Vintners Rooms and Forth Floor could hardly make a greater contrast. The former is a celebration of old Edinburgh, its mercantile connections, its fine wine traditions and its historical relationship with France. Forth Floor, meanwhile, is emblematic of contemporary Edinburgh: confident, cosmopolitan and chic. The Vintners Rooms has warmth, well-to-do elegance and intimacy. The view from Forth Floor embraces the city's skyline, just as its menu embraces the world, from gravadlax to gnocchi, roulade to Moroccan spices, grilled salmon to aromatic pot-roast pork.
The menu at the Vintners Rooms is altogether more French and more classic, or has variations on classic themes: marinated tuna with artichokes barigoule; veal sweatbreads with sauce cévenole; fillet of Aberdeen Angus with sauce forestière; rack of lamb provençale with olive jus. This is not all that surprising, since the proprietors (and chef) are French. That is not to say that the cooking does not show wit, flair and individuality. I had escabeche of sardines with peppers and pistou sauce, which came as a kind of sandwich, the layers of vegetables lying between fillets of fish. It was as exhilarating and delightful to eat as it was to look upon, the firm texture and flavour of the fish still intact after its wine bath, the peppers and pesto adding a vegetable richness to each mouthful.
It was a perfect precursor to peppered venison with bitter chocolate sauce. Although chocolate sauce with meat is more common in Mexican cookery (and hence in Spanish and southern Italian cookery), the Vintners Rooms dish was as expressive of French haute cuisine - poised and elegant and rich, but not too concentrated as to overwhelm the distinctive, lightly acidic flavour of the venison. This was pretty stylish and potent stuff. Even the rather cutting-edge pudding of strawberries with olive confit and thyme sorbet had the cultured and sophisticated air of haute cuisine rather than outré modernism.
My dishes at Forth Floor - scallops with endive and chorizo salad, orange oil and mint, then slow-baked chump of lamb marinated in Moroccan spices with roasted garlic - were mainstream modernist. But they were no less accomplished in their way with flavours, although they did not have quite so many layers of flavour. Their effectiveness depended on the degrees of separation between elements, rather than on the craftsmanship with which they were dovetailed together.
They were more Frank Gehry and less Phillip Johnson. And, like Gehry's buildings, when they succeed, as mine did, the results have pizazz and vivacity. When they don't come off, however, the degrees of separation become distracting and irritating. Certainly Joanna Blythman, with whom I was eating, became irritated at the plethora of ingredients in a salad of seared beef with roasted radicchio and figs and mustard dressing and asparagus and tomatoes, and too many other things to mention. It became an unbalanced mish-mash, making you appreciate the subtler pleasures of carefully integrated elements. That was not a criticism you could aim at Joanna's earlier dish, asparagus and pea soup, because it lacked any real sense of distinction of any kind. It was, she said, " Saturday night soup" - an agglomeration of leftovers, perfectly acceptable, but not memorable in any way.
Interestingly, there is not as much difference in terms of price between these two exemplars of Edinburgh's restaurant world. Forth Floor wins the cheap first course competition with a couple of dishes at £5.50, but its fillet of beef pops up at £22.50 against the Vintners Rooms' £19, and its grilled organic salmon with saffron potatoes and a summer herb and lardon dressing is £1 more than The Vintners Rooms' roast halibut with saffron mussel broth. And so on and so on. But there is not much to choose between them when it comes to the final bill, particularly if you get stuck into the excellent wine lists of either - another grand Edinburgh tradition.
I suppose it rather depends on what kind of experience you want. Me, I'd go to Forth Floor for lunch and enjoy the particular steely clarity of northern light as well as the food (and exemplary service), and then go on to to the Vintners Rooms for dinner for graceful, comfortable indulgence (and exemplary service).
