Telephone: 0131-557 6727
Address: The Balmoral, 1 Princes Street, Edinburgh.
I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with cheese, but while holidaying earlier this year in Antibes, I made a 500km round trip to the Provençal village of Puimichel, just to buy a rare pot of the local fromage fort. It's called Cachaille, is made by grating dry cheese into an earthenware pot, then adding eau-de-vie, pepper, olive oil and fresh cheese, and can be kept for up to 20 years, if periodically topped up with new cheese. (Unsurprisingly, it stinks like a rotting cadaver, but then what is cheese if not the corpse of milk?)
The cheeses wheeled to my table at the end of this review (on something resembling a mortuary trolley for midgets) were almost as powerful, including a Pouligny Saint-Pierre in its feculent prime. You can count the appearances on British cheeseboards of this "Eiffel tower" (so-called because of its pyramid shape) on the fingers of a twice-convicted Saudi shoplifter. But now, let's begin this review at the beginning and, as with watching Pulp Fiction, all will become clear by the end. Though probably with less bloodshed.
I was heading for Number One (situated within Edinburgh's Balmoral hotel) and things weren't going well. Where was I going to park? I phoned ahead and was told "There's plenty of space at Andrew's Square" which was true, but it's all for one hour only, so I was forced to queue for the NCP behind John Lewis, then leg it down to Princes Street (not a pretty sight).
Things got worse when I descended into the basement restaurant, because I was suddenly surrounded by klaxon-voiced Americans shouting into their mobile phones while eating (I have a garbage disposal unit that eats better than 30% of the people in this world), and when I told the waiter "I'm not drinking wine", he immediately brought me the wine list. Was the award-winning Number One going to be a load of number twos?
Fortunately, things began improving from that moment on. I was last here in the late 1990s and, looking around, I could see that the deep-red lacquered-box-style rooms had recently been tarted up with golden stripes, the spacious airy feel of this subterranean space being further enhanced by the presence of huge muscular chairs, which afforded an expansive comfort of North American proportions. Better still, half the restaurant was closed off, so lunch promised to be an agreeably intimate affair.
Who gets excited by soup? Well, we did. The love of my life had the "anaemic rhubarb" soup (or "celery", if you prefer the wording on the menu) and thought the Stilton beignets worked well as an accompaniment (I tasted and concurred). My cream of onion soup with ham hough and truffle oil was equally sublime, with the meat encased within a single raviolo and floating on a pea-green coloured broth, surrounded by shreds of onion, and perhaps celeriac, too (I never ask - it seems petty). The chef may be Bland (Jeff Bland), but his cooking is far from it.
Poor chefies - they just can't bloody win, can they? The soups were so perfect that they almost overshadowed the more elaborate main courses. The sage and orange crusted monkfish risotto cake and chive beurre blanc was a little too fancy for its own good, having been constructed in the fashionable Tower of Babel style. (Can't we dispense with this high-rise Japanese architectural approach, and go back to the single-storey food of yesteryear? Did Ronan Point teach us nothing?)
Still, the result was more impressive to the palate than to the eye, especially as I'd reversed my earlier decision about the wine, and washed it down with a glass of Clifford Bay New Zealand Riesling (limey and spicy, and therefore ideal for spicy limeys). Madame, meanwhile, had vegetarian roast globe artichokes with lemon tagliatelle, ratatouille, and asparagus with tomato jus, which was a light lunch for her, but an irresistible feed-line for me. Well, the artichokes were accompanied by a quartet of sage potato quenelles, thus allowing me to exclaim loudly, "Four quenelles!" without the risk of being ejected from the restaurant. Childish, I know, but it fulfilled a lifetime's ambition, and shut up the mobile phone users, too.
Her white chocolate and raspberry soufflé with raspberry ripple ice cream arrived, and soon she was lost in reverie. I, meanwhile, was lost in admiration for the ripe-to-perfection cheeseboard mentioned earlier (I said we'd get there) and for a glass of Quinta do Noval 10-year-old tawny port that was light enough to lift the cheese without drowning it.
The spectacular cuisine was matched throughout by the attentive staff, and I noted with approval that the restaurant has not only wheelchair access, but wheelchair access to the WC, too. Many restaurants don't have the latter, which seems a terribly cruel trick to play on the physically infirm, who can ingest as much food and drink as they like, but are not allowed to expel any of it afterwards.
· Open: Lunch: 12 noon-2pm, Monday-Friday. Dinner: 7-10pm, Sunday-Thursday; 7-10.30pm, Friday-Saturday.
Menus: Lunch: two courses £16.50; three courses £19.50. Dinner (chef's tasting menu): £55 or £85 with wine. My lunch for two: £63.35 with wine.
Wheelchair access and WC
