Unique, delicious, risky and completely remarkable
Leith is a mere amble away from the tourist bedlam of Edinburgh’s Princes Street. It is both two miles and a million miles from there. Turn left just after Waverley station, keep going until the bagpipe howl of The Green Hills of Tyrol fades into traffic noise, and soon you’ll come across The Little Chartroom, a relatively new, decidedly bijou, nautical cartography-fixated and almost-fine-dining restaurant.
Not definitely fine dining, as in “staff in white gloves wheezing in your ear while wrestling with cloches”. Instead, this is the sort of fine dining where modern French-British, seasonally focused plates are precisely hewn and the dinner options are brief but meaningful. Three starters, three mains and, if you perch at one of the four seats at the bar (which you may need to, because there are only 18 covers in total), you can survey the construction of, for example, an intricate caramelised onion tart with a bitter leaf salad.
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