The Dogs, 110 Hanover Street, Edinburgh (0131 220 1208).
Meal for two, including wine and service: £40-£60
The last time I saw Dave Ramsden he was running a restaurant in Leith which looked like a cross between a Swedish women's prison and a gay brothel. To be honest, I've never spent time in either, more's the pity, but I've got a vivid imagination, combined with some dodgy cinematic references, and I'm certain if you mated those two venues the result would have been (Fitz)Henry: all varnished wood, flounces of material, and dark brooding ceilings. Ramsden, who is toothpick thin and shaven headed, has a voice so deep it seems to begin its life somewhere around his gonads. He suited the place beautifully. The food, though occasionally odd, was good, which combination - odd, but in a good way - also matched Ramsden's reputation. Later he set up a restaurant called Rogue, which won a bib gourmand from Michelin before going bust. That, Ramsden announced, sent him into therapy. I'm jealous of his therapist. Ramsden looks like a man with really good secrets.
Anyway, he's back with a new restaurant in Edinburgh called the Dogs. To which you want to say, what? Breakfast? Dinner? Bollocks? None of them, apparently. All it's missing is a plural possessive apostrophe, for Dave has dogs and the new venture is named with them in mind. They also loom large in the design, such as it is. Where (Fitz)Henry and Rogue were one man spewing the wild, garish pictures in his head out into the real world, as if trying to be shot of them, the Dogs is essentially two whitewashed upper-floor rooms within a chunk of Edinburgh Georgiana. The only decorations are various pictures of dogs, Dave's dogs to be precise, including the painted silhouette on the wall of a dog holding a knife and fork. Woof, as they might say.
The food is equally pared down. I recall from my meal at (Fitz)Henry a dish of red mullet split down the gut, with braised squid pouring out as though the fish had undergone a ritual disembowelment. Cue ghoulish laughter and guttering candlelight. Nothing of the sort here. Ramsden has insisted in interviews that it should not be called gastro-pub food, and because he looks a little scary I'll do what he says (though you know that's exactly what I think it is). It's big, rustic, hardy stuff: broths and stews, pies and things piled on plates.
To my disappointment the longer, more interesting menu isn't available at lunchtime. In the evening there's braised ox cheek with pickled walnuts and horseradish mash or fish pie; there's duck livers with roasted garlic, bacon and chicory or lamb breast with a mustard and herb crust. Most main courses barely break the £10 mark. Most starters are less than half that. The lunchtime menu, where almost nothing costs more than a fiver, is a simpler affair, though it boasts good things, too. A bowl of potent mutton broth came with big pieces of meat, soft knobbly pearl barley and sweet, long-simmered root vegetables, yours for £2.75. A crusty roll stuffed full of crumbly salt beef slicked with horseradish mayo was satisfying (if a little light on fat; good salt beef needs a little fat). At the end a dish of creamy lemon posset coated the tongue nicely. It came with a particularly impressive shortbread biscuit with a nice salty end.
Other things were less than whelming. The goat cheese in a salad with walnuts and beetroot was just like me: creamy, fresh and young. But the whole affair was under-dressed. Beetroot also turned out to be something of a recurring theme. It was not just in that salad, but also in my salt beef roll and it turned up again alongside a plate of slightly dry, slightly under-seasoned baked sardine fillets. Maybe they felt the white-out of the room needed a bit more colour. There was no beetroot in a bowl of rhubarb and custard, though it might have benefited from that. Both elements were vigorously under-sweetened.
Still, it's hard to criticise the honesty of this new venture. Dave Ramsden has been many things in his life. He has managed bands. He has worked the clubs of Ibiza. He has waited tables. All the way through he has been a showman, throwing a bit of colour at the world, with scant regard for whether the world really wanted it. The Dogs feels like his grown-up take on the world, his retreat towards simpler, more robust virtues. And that puts both it and him on the side of the angels.
jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
