First, that name: it may well be inspired by a wood carving in the thistle chapel of St Giles Cathedral just across the road, but Angels With Bagpipes is still a naff, cheesy tourist-grabbing moniker of the sort which litters the once proud Royal Mile. And on a particularly dreich and drizzly Good Friday, there are certainly plenty of tourists parading up and down the High Street on pilgrimages to Meccas of Jimmy hats and hip-hop ceilidh CDs.
Once inside, however, it is clear how much Angels With Bagpipes’ name works against it. This is a bijou and tres chic wining and dining spot. While publicity blurb calls it the kind of place where Rabbie Burns could take Sophia Loren on a date, thereby implying a perfect match of rugged Scots and sophisticated European, it’s clear that this is a continentally inclined restaurant with the Scottish element expressed through use of produce and ingredients.
Black clad waiters glide in a welcoming yet unobtrusive manner around the three narrow rooms, while there is also a one-table side room which is where Robin, M and I have been deposited today. The main A La Carte menu is enticing but pricy, so we’re here today to try the seasonal menu of two courses for £11.95 or three for £15.95. Quite a bargain for what is clearly aiming to be a prestige restaurant in Edinburgh’s heartland.
One slight niggle is that those prices are just for the individual courses. Any side dishes, even a small plate of bread with olive oil and balsamic, come in as extras of £3 and upwards. That aside, M and Robin are pleased with their starters of white bean soup with truffle oil, smoothly textured and perfectly warming against the resurgence of winter outside. My first course is a curious amalgam of fried duck egg with chicken, morteaux sausage and lentils. The egg lies across a broth-like lentil stew dotted with slight studs of meat and a couple of incongruous lumps of chicken. It’s a rather odd concoction which would be made better were the sausage to be made more prominent and the chicken lost entirely to create a more robust dish. But it’s certainly not unpleasant, far from it, just peculiar.
Our mains are resounding winners, however. It being a Friday, Robin is most pleased with his fish and chips. It would be preferable were the menu to state what kind of fish (he deduces haddock) but it comes in a crisp, glistening batter with French fries style chips and a mound of semi-mushy peas. M’s goats’ cheese and apple tartlet is similarly well-received, with perfectly done pastry though a slight surfeit of white onion. I am particularly impressed with my “pork, head-toe” platter. Wonderful meaty cubes of fatty pork meat which could be eaten with a spoon in a velvety jus with accompanying black pudding bonbon and a curl of crackling, it’s a superb carnivorous feast and works perfectly with our collective side dish of buttered spinach.
Deceptive portion size means we all forego dessert, bar a shared cheese plate. With a £1.25 supplement, it’s a somewhat meagre serving of three slivers of acceptable but far from special cheese, coming with a nicely spiced pear chutney. The only duff note to what has otherwise been an excellent well-priced lunch in lovely restaurant which deserves its place in the centre of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. If only they would do something about that cringe-inducing name.