Harry's Bar And Grill
7b Randolph Place, Edinburgh
0131 539 8100
Lunch/Dinner £6-£30
Food rating 8 ½/10
THESE days, I find myself ignoring whole sections of menus – those lists of burgers, steaks, the inevitable farmed sea bass, the sine qua non goat cheese, the tiger prawns, the chicken of non-specified origins, the platters I could assemble at home with much better quality ingredients. Some of my resistance comes down to ethical issues, but more often, it’s sheer boredom.
Only a pampered food critic can carp about the tedium of eating out, and I don’t expect any sympathy for my plight, but there must be others paying with their own wallets who scan menus for dishes that seem a bit less predictable.
At Harry’s Bar And Grill, a roomy, night club-like basement restaurant in a quaint corner of Edinburgh’s west end, my eyes flick rapidly over at the usual roll call of steaks, unmoved by the increasingly common assurance that they are from “grass-fed beef" and "dry-aged between 28 and 36 days”. I clock the modish language: pot roast spring chicken is “burnt”, rump of lamb and chicory is “fired”, squash is “flame-roasted”. The terminological niceties of these distinctions are lost on me, but pork belly from the venerable Tamworth breed, with white onion purée, and charred radicchio, catches my fancy, largely because I have just returned from Treviso in Italy, famed for its production of the latter ingredient. There, radicchio invariably makes an appearance grilled rather than raw, and so it is in this rather glamorous line-up, glossy with oil atop cubes of brittle crackling over larded flesh, providing a bitter contrast to the sweet onions and meat.
When the calamari appeared, a sleuth might have detected an Italian hand at the stove. It was a very Italian frittura of ivory rings and mauve tentacles, not the airiest of batters ever, certainly, but good enough, and the squid was spanking fresh. I couldn’t taste the basil or saffron in its aioli, which was more mustardy to my palate, but anyway, the wedge of lemon was enough for me.
The dish of the day (£16), a half lobster with its covey of plump mussels in a racy bouillabaisse, had a stiff chilli kick to it. The broth oozed essence of shellfish and might attract compliments in Marseille. We learned by this point that the chefs are Italian, so my money is on them coming from Calabria, or some other southern peperoncino-loving region. I do worry about the increasing prominence of lobster on menus. How did lobster get to be dish of the day? Here’s hoping the regal, armoured crustacean isn’t been fished out like other vulnerable seafood. But what a luscious delight it was to eat.
“Spring minestrone with parmesan dumplings, basil pesto” was a funny old dish. Did I miss something, or is this autumn? It wasn’t at all what I’d expected. The soup was stew-thick with a cute dice of courgette, pepper, carrot and tomato, but a heavy hand with the passata or tomato paste made it too intense in the mouth, and glossy, like an advert for Cuppa Soup. The dumplings – I was imagining gnocchi here – were tough-coated fritters, so their filling, a sultry melt of well-aged cheese spiked with lemon, was the star of the show. Charred cos lettuce with Parmesan – there’s that Italian grilling thing again – was like a warm Caesar salad, the lettuce steamily crunchy at its heart, and gently blackened at its extremities.
With Italian chefs in the kitchen, I don’t count on great desserts. In il bel paese, it’s all about gelato, and (whisper it), the French, even the Brits, often perform better otherwise in the pudding department. But I liked the flourless dark chocolate cake with its dark sauce, a grown-up confection with a suitably restrained sugar level. Lemon posset majored on the zesty citrus and velvety cream, again, not sugar, was generously bejewelled with lovely berries, and flanked by friable butter shortbread.
You can see that Harry’s Grill chooses its suppliers wisely. Cheese comes from Iain Mellis, a byword for integrity and quality. Sourdough bread is excellent. Poultry is free-range. Seafood comes from Welch, supplier to the impeccable Ondine. And that Italian insistence on freshness shows in everything.
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