The Kitchin
78 Commercial Quay
Leith, Edinburgh
(0131 555 1755).
Meal for two, including wine and service, £130
Rumours are circulating in London that the great Gascon chef Pierre Koffman is about to open a brasserie. There's nothing new in this. Rumours have been circulating about Koffman since the day in 2002 when he closed his multi-Michelin-starred restaurant La Tante Claire. He's opening a bistro. He's launching a chain. He's forming a cabaret act with Ainsley Harriott and hitting the road. All right, not the last one, which is the stuff of drug-induced nightmares, but certainly Koffman has an uncommon hold over the culinary imaginations of both cooks and eaters. Gordon Ramsay trained with him. Marcus Wareing trained with him. Marco Pierre White trained with him and put one of his dishes - braised pig's trotters stuffed with chicken mousse and morels and a whole bunch of other things - on his own menu with the master's name attached. Koffman's approach - gutsy, solid cooking which puts flavour above all else - has an irresistible allure.
It can be felt, for example, in the simple but highly accomplished dishes sent out by Raphael Duntoye at London's La Petite Maison. Think whole roast black leg chicken or veal with a sweet, dark, caramelised crust. And it's also there in the cooking of Tom Kitchin in Edinburgh. Kitchin, who has the kind of name that demands a career in catering, is short and solid and built for beating the hell out of ingredients at the stove. He makes no secret of the debt he owes Koffman. 'He's still my mentor,' he told me a few months back. 'In fact, all the plates, cutlery and glassware are from La Tante Claire. What really matters with Pierre, though, is his food. There's no ponciness to it. It's all about flavour and that's what I try to concentrate on, too.'
He succeeds. His restaurant, in a retail development on the waterside in Leith, is not exactly an elegant space. The unit could quite as easily house a Tex Mex place. It's utilitarian, all hard man-made materials softened with clever lighting. On the upside it does not lend itself to stupid, buttock-clenched formality. The night we went this Michelin-starred restaurant was noisy with excited chatter. Nobody had come here to worship. They had come here to eat.
They had come for a tiny cup of big-flavoured wild garlic soup, the colour of leaves in spring, mined with shards of crisp garlic and a tablet of roast ox tongue, crunchy on the outside, soft within. They had come for langoustine tails the size of Mike Tyson's fingers, properly seasoned and properly roasted, with a small cake of braised pig's head and a paper-thin tuile of crispy pig's ear. They had come for food which pays more than lip service to the seasons. Asparagus with morels and a poached egg is not exactly a shocking combination. But the addition of an intense asparagus puree lifts it above the familiar.
And that sums up Kitchin's approach. He is not trying to surprise or shock. He is trying to feed; to take the obvious and, by sheer strength of execution, give you more than you expected. Red mullet with salsa verde and a citrus dressing? Straight out of the Mediterranean playbook. But his version had an extra zing which almost (but not quite) justified the description of that citrus dressing as 'lemonade'. An assiette of lamb brought not just pink rump, but also a curl of luscious belly and some kidney. This is special occasion food, with a price tag in the evenings to match. Starters are in the low teens, mains in the high twenties. Then again, if he put it on at a fixed price of £46 for three courses, the gasps would be shallower and fewer.
Dessert is not, perhaps, such a strength. A delice of Valrhona chocolate was a little too rich to be enjoyable, though I very much liked the frothy salted caramel milk shake on the side. In a plate of citrus - mousse, marmalade, tuile - the real star was a cooling Earl Grey sorbet, with the soothing hit of bergamot. Those slight weaknesses aside, the dishes served here feel like the cooking of a man who has found his voice and is very comfortable with it. Clearly Pierre Koffman was a good teacher. The latest rumour about Koffman, incidentally, seems to have legs. Apparently there is a site and he's even hired chefs. If it is a brasserie, it will be Koffman speaking in simpler, more earthy tones than of old and when it opens we will be there. For those who want something more evolved and intricate there's always Kitchin.
