Fishers In the City, 58 Thistle Street, Edinburgh EH2 1EN (0131 225 5109). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £100
I am many things: tall, thick of waist and big haired. One gust of wind and I can end up looking like an unmade bed. Even without the wind, I may still look like that saggy sofa you can’t be bothered to throw out because of all the admin. I have never been able to slip into a room unseen. If I ring a doorbell after dark, I take four steps back after doing so, to avoid scaring the hell out of even my closest friends. If I am walking along a street late at night and there is a single person in front of me I cross to the other side, so as not to be that huge, looming presence in the shadows; the one who is terrifying until proven otherwise. I am indeed many things; easy to ignore is not one of them.
And yet the woman on the front desk at Edinburgh’s Fishers in the City is managing it. She could get a Masters in ignoring me. She does not look up as we come in. She is on the phone, apparently arranging a function. She is ordering 24 bottles of something, eyes only for her computer screen. It feels like a blunt calculation has been made; this caller is more valuable than the man in my peripheral vision. On and on it goes, this conversation. No one else comes. We look around the wood-lined restaurant: at the waitress restocking the glasses behind the bar on one side, at her colleague idling by a service point on the other. About seven minutes in, as she is winding up, our “greeter” finally raises her eyes. She signals apology. Then the call is done, a perfunctory “sorry” is muttered and a name asked for.
It’s a small thing, isn’t it, this wait at the front desk? I wonder if she recalls it, even now. But that’s what restaurants are: a bunch of small things, done well, or badly. Those done well slip over you, like the popping suds in a warm bubble bath. The ones done badly are pieces of Lego stepped on in the night. Boy, you remember those. Fishers in the City could be a truly terrific fish restaurant, if it weren’t for the small things that aren’t terrific.
It certainly has great antecedents. When the original opened a little over 20 years ago, overlooking the flash and dip of the waters in Leith at the city’s harbour edge, it offered something Edinburgh didn’t have much of back then: great cooking served without flummery. It turned out you could have a good dinner without acres of starchy tablecloths or starched waiters. It played to Scotland’s reputation for the briny, mollusced and crustaceaned. It endured because it did all the important things well. As Edinburgh’s restaurant sector grew, an outpost back in the centre of the city must have made sense. A friend told me they had come to prefer the younger sibling to the original.
I can see why. All the essentials are here: there are oysters, left unmolested, or grilled with a bone-marrow crust. There are mussels from Shetland, platters of salmon, as gravadlax and both smoked and in an elderberry and vodka cure alongside pickled cucumber. The soup is a cream-ballasted chowder, made with salmon and smoked haddock. They have fish and chips and hot seafood platters, but also a menu of other more evolved things.
And here’s the point: some of it genuinely makes you sigh, and rest your elbows on the table. Soft, pearly fillets of lemon sole, curled in on themselves as they might be for a classic Véronique, come with a chive potato cake, a kind of rosti. Looking at the uniformity of the strands I suspect a spiraliser might have been involved, but we will forgive them this for the brazenness of the fat-fried crust. There are grinning mussels and a brilliant green velouté flavoured with breezy notes of tarragon. It’s serious and confident cooking.
We order a hot shellfish plater for one and it is a monumental thing, as it should be for £50. Two people could get major satisfaction out of one person’s portion. There is half a small lobster and a sizeable crab claw, a couple of fat scallops still clinging to the shell, and a brace of langoustine. There are clams, and all of it glazed in a garlicky, parsley-coloured butter emulsion that will repeat on you for days. A salad of sweet, nutty new potatoes and rocket makes you feel like you’re getting your greens. So yes, there are good things here at Fishers in the City.
But, oh those pieces of Lego, cutting deep into the arch of your foot. There’s the discovery that all the good things in the seafood platter are supported by an enormous pile of mussels, the cheapest item in the seafood restaurant’s fridge. There’s the starter of salt and pepper squid which is simply too salty, as are the chips. It takes a quite terrifying amount of salt to make chips completely resistible. The kitchen here manages it. Over salting feels like a nervous tick that no one is managing.
Another starter of crab Welsh rarebit sounds luscious and clever. Crab and butch, mustardy cheese are bound to get along. But there is something mimsy about the topping to the toast. It lacks that vital instinct to feed. Bread is just the wrong side of completely fresh. Roasted plums, the fruit lined up on the plate as if on guard duty, come surrounded by a rubble of crumble and just aren’t quite roasted enough. They make you wish for a straightforward crumble.
It’s all in the details, isn’t it? The service at our table is warm and engaged and fully present without being intrusive. But what I recall is less her, than the woman on the phone at the start. Fishers in the City is like one of those old televisions that needed to be thumped on the side to stop the picture wobbling. I hope they can give the operation the friendly whack it needs.
For Edinburgh, honour is saved later that evening by a quick supper at the Fat Pony, the new place from redoubtable restaurateur David Ramsden. We grab a few small plates: there’s smokey spiced lamb shawarma on warm fluffy flat bread, blissfully silky little pork gyoza, and an impeccable charcuterie board with pickles and chutneys and, for company, a quite lovely bottle of flinty Godello. Service is slick, prices are reasonable and absolutely nothing goes wrong. Is all that too much to hope for?
Jay Rayner’s news bites
• Alex Aitken’s Jetty in Christchurch, Dorset is now the cornerstone of a mini seafood restaurant empire. The number of menus may be exhausting, but there’s some very good cooking here, based on cracking ingredients. Go for cod cheek fritters, rock oysters, torched mackerel fillets and a killer mixed fish grill. All in a shiny glass box by the sea (thejetty.co.uk).
• Each year the American magazine Restaurant Business lists the biggest-grossing non-chain restaurants in the US. For the fourth year running the winner is Tao Asian Bistro in Las Vegas, with a staggering take of $42,470,345. Then again, it seats 400 people and most of them spend at least $90 a head.
• Once upon a time Wagamama had the casual Japanese restaurant scene to itself. Now it has serious competition. Hence, they have turned their branch on Dean Street in Soho into The Noodle Lab, a test bed for new dishes. Diners will be asked to review what they’ve tried (wagamama.com/noodle-lab).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
