356 Castlehill, Edinburgh (0131 225 1550). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £90
It is the height of the Edinburgh Festival and outside the window by our table in this high-ceilinged dining room, the flag of St Andrew flutters. Noise bubbles up from the buskers working the Lawnmarket and some distance away dear old Gyles Brandreth is limbering up to revive the hoary old gag that “a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes, but doesn’t.” It’s a sentiment with which I have much sympathy. From the drone and rasp coming from the streets, Edinburgh is rather short of gentlemen at this time of year.
Based on this latest restaurant from the venerable Contini family it’s not short on a soft nationalism, expressed through the culinary. Long before restaurants in other parts of the UK became label obsessed, as if slapping the name of a market town before the word “chicken” immediately gave it virtue, a certain type of Scottish restaurant was bigging up locality through the food on the plate. Here at Contini Cannonball, they want you to know that this is very much a Scottish restaurant, serving Scottish food. In case you weren’t clear they’ve put whisky in the sour cream sauce to go with fried (cannon) balls of haggis, and tartan on the banquettes.
I try to imagine an English version of this, and all I can come up with is something that sounds like a Ukip clubhouse, and I start grinding my teeth. That, it seems to me, is the real triumph of modern Scottish nationalism: it manages not to feel parochial or prejudicial, merely celebratory. Given the quality of the ingredients – the excellent seafood, the cracking beef – this is reasonable for a restaurant. The fact that across huge swathes of Scotland too much of the mass catering still ought to be taped off by health services as a crime scene, is neither here nor there. We are in Edinburgh, on a site hard by the Castle, and here everything is bright and enlightened and lovely.
The name Cannonball House may have come from a round fired by government troops up at the Castle during the Jacobite rising of 1745, which got lodged in the brickwork. Rather less sexily, it may have come from a cannonball used to mark gravitational height for some of the city’s plumbing. Either way, around 1905 it became a schoolhouse, which is what it feels like today as you traipse up the staircase to the top. There, it opens out into a cream-coloured space of tall windows and dangling lamps and a broad marble bar. Carina and Victor Contini, a branch of the same Scottish-Italian family that runs Valvona & Crolla, took it over a few months ago, installing a café downstairs and this restaurant up above.
It’s a slick and professional operation, as you would expect of a company that runs other places across the city, including the catering for the Scottish National Gallery. Service is warm, engaged and focussed – I have only just noticed I have spilt sauce down my shirt when our chap is at my side with a tidily folded napkin dipped in warm water for me to dab the mark of shame away. Victor may wander the tables at lunchtime informing diners of the building’s ghost (whether you have an interest in such things or not), but such hokey stuff doesn’t hide an eye for detail.
The food, on a special menu designed for the high-volume trade of the festival, is pretty. It’s “edible flowers on the plate” pretty. Three of their small, peppery haggis balls come with a heap of soft, pickled and shredded turnip, scattered with petals of violet and pinks. It’s a bunch of hardcore donkey-jacket Scottish ingredients in well-fitted Jimmy Choo’s. A single fat scallop, perfectly cooked, lies on a bed of crumbled black pudding in the half shell, and topped with more blooms. I don’t know whether to eat it or enter it in a Royal Horticultural Society competition. Impeccable smoked salmon is let down by being piled up in a heap on the middle of the plate, rather than spread across it, but once I’ve untangled the slices it does the job, sent on its way with carefully judged blobs of lemon curd made with the whiff and waft of Amalfi lemons.
Their Cullen skink, all firm potato, smokey haddock and half a cow’s worth of cream, is the kind of bowlful to make you think dreamily of cold winter afternoons; a chicken salad, with a grilled sliced breast and the crunch of green beans, comes flying in from another season altogether. Apparently it comes with “Uncle Roy’s peppercorn mustard and Victor’s honey dressing”. There’s a lot of this first-name stuff on the menu, but it doesn’t make the dishes more special. The salad just seems adequately dressed. Most substantial of the main courses is a piece of long-roasted pork belly, which came all the way from Ayrshire to be here. No crackling – which is a crime against pig – but lots of roast new potatoes and tomatoes, and a fat smear of apple sauce.
So all very neat and tidy and easy on the eye. Quickly, I sense the reins being held tightly by an obsessive-compulsive operations director; one who has worked out exactly how to get a tidy profit out of this space. To put it another way, the pricing is what some might call keen, and others opportunistic – £6 for three very small haggis balls is going some. More concerning is that £8 serving of Cullen Skink, which would make a good-sized starter. Unfortunately it actually costs £12 and is meant as a main course. The chicken salad is an ambitious £13.95. Only the pork belly, priced at £13, feels about right.
At dessert there is a stumble. A berry crumble is one of those assembly jobs restaurant kitchens think will pass but won’t: a heap of compote buried under some loose-crumbed biscuit gravel. It’s OK, but it’s not a bloody crumble. Unfortunately the whorls of cream topping a raspberry and lemon trifle have been overwhipped until they’ve split. It happens. They acknowledge the error and take it off the bill. What matters in these situations is not the mistake, but how they deal with it, which is impeccably.
There is then, lots to admire about this place. But I do find myself only admiring rather than loving Contini Cannonball. Professionalism is good. Professionalism is great. But when it leaves you feeling a little over-charged for what feels more like a product and less like lunch, there is a problem.
Jay’s news bites
■ For more cheerful outbreaks of tartan and Scottish culinary nationalism, try Tom Kitchin’s gastropub the Scran and Scallie in Stockbridge. It’s the place for cured salmon, pork terrine with gooseberries, a hefty steak or fish pie and a whisky baba with raspberries (scranandscallie.com).
■ If you’re keen to think of Greece as more than just depressing economic headlines, good news: chef Theodore Kyriakou is putting together London’s first Greek wine festival. There will be appearances by Masters of Wine Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding, and food supplied by Kyriakou’s restaurant The Greek Larder. It takes place on 2-4 October at King’s Place, in London’s King’s Cross. Which also happens to be home to this newspaper. Hurrah! (londongreekwinefestival.co.uk).
■ Time for the annual check-up on menu trends, from the research company Horizons. The use of ethical terms on menus is up 10% with gluten-free descriptions up 23%. But the big winner is the vegetarian’s friend, halloumi, with a 54% increase in references to it on British menus (hrzns.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
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