'It's the sort of place that people who adore prodding and sniffing their food will love… with a polite, slightly long-winded passion'
Listen to this: a green "cannelloni" tube filled with white crabmeat, sweet and spritzed with lemon. We're prodding the tube – it's not pasta. What could it be? Avocado? Well, the "flesh" yields like avocado. But no, it almost melts, flooding the crab in buttery herbiness. So, OK, it's chilled herb butter – quite a feat of engineering.
It sits on a bed of greenery, micro herbs and mini-salad, in which twinkle little jewels of lemon, created, I'd guess, with spherification. Or are they just minuscule juice sacs, painstakingly liberated from the fruit by the lowest rung on the kitchen hierarchy? Nope, spherification.
This is presented on an inverted glass cone, balanced on a mini-goldfish bowl in which swirls fragrant woodsmoke. Lift up the cone – where to put it? Oh, I can't, it's cone-shaped – and there's more crab and a rich, buttery custard of something or other. What? What? All I can taste is smoke, but the undertaste is maddeningly familiar… Cauliflower. With all this going on, the poor crab has been so upstaged it's like that X Factor final when Beyoncé sang with, well, someone or other.
Or this: an "espuma" (bless you!) of potato and parsley, neither item noted for the forthrightness of its flavour. ("He said parsnip." "Did he? So why's it green?") It's blowsy and silkily frothed, as if jetted straight from a pressurised gun into a fat glass sitting in the carved indent of a cross section of tree. There's a wink of truffle oil on top. Of course there is.
Does this kind of thing tickle your trout? If it does, chef Mark Greenaway's handsome new premises will deliver your idea of very nirvana. It's the sort of place that people who adore prodding and sniffing their food, and who're happy only if meat comes in a brace of different cooking styles accessorised with dots of things and cubes and sploshes of other things, will love. They'll love it with a polite, slightly long-winded passion.
Here, marvel at the Clash Farm pork belly, its top crisp, its fat melting, its meat tender. It's underseasoned and I'm devastated that its toffee apple sauce amounts to no more than a George Osborne teardrop. A hake dish, conversely, is salted almost into oblivion, wildly over-dilled, but not quite enough to disguise the fact that the fish doesn't seem in the first flush of youth. Lovely lone lobster raviolo, however.
Greenaway is one of those almost-celebrity chefs, appearing on the likes of Great British Menu. He showcased that crab dish there and clearly enjoys hanging on to a well-thumbed file of favourite dishes. The result is that it all seems vaguely dated, even by the standards of the famously conservative Scottish capital. Anyone with a penchant for fayn daynin' will be familiar with the old smoke and glassware – when a piece of culinary trickery turns up on MasterChef, you know it's about as happening as nouvelle cuisine.
He's also fond of the kind of convoluted, deconstructed desserts that reference his patissier training, although form over function strikes again: a tasting of pear that features, ironically, jellies and crisps and sorbets whose flavours have fled. And with forward-looking newcomers setting the pace in the city – the likes of Timberyard and Tom Kitchin's the Scran & Scallie– his restaurant runs the risk of looking like a Morningside matron at Coachella.
Anyway, two things make me warm to Greenaway before we leave his new New Town location, with its sludge-blue walls (probably Farrow & Ball and called something like North Sea Oil Slick) and dramatic brass and etched-glass light fittings. First, the bill: posho ambition and technique at London gastropub prices. And, second, the little girl who's asked to come here for her birthday to see the man off the telly and who leaves with signed menus and a huge grin on her face. Yes, folks, this TV chef is actually in his kitchen. How remarkable.
• Restaurant Mark Greenaway 69 North Castle Street, Edinburgh, 0131-226 1155. Open Tues-Sat, noon-2.30pm, 5.30-10pm. Set menu, £16.50 for two courses, £20 for three; à la carte about £40, tasting menu £65, all plus drinks and service.
Food 6/10
Atmosphere 6/10
Value for money 8/10
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