Now it has moved to Nicolson Street to more capacious premises, famous for being where a would-be author by the name of JK Rowling part-wrote Harry Potter. Being up a flight of steps, this isn’t the easiest venue to pull in the public. So Spoon has free wi-fi, which means it is full of students, escaping cold flats and making a drink last for hours as they sit staring into their laptops not writing their essays. The spend per customer might be low, but this clientele makes Spoon feel like a public space, your personal sitting room in the city, and so creates an easy-going informality.
Organising such a big space as a cafe isn’t straightforward, but these premises are already full of character and Spoon has added lashings of its own.
It is the antithesis of the branded corporate coffee shops that crowd our streets, being idiosyncratic and one-off; vintage chic, you might say. The decorative theme hovers between the 1950s and 1960s. There’s an interesting collection of second-hand furniture, everything from Ercol tables and chairs to utility kitchen dressers and junk-shop finds that have been plastered with old comics or maps, then varnished. The lighting is equally haphazard. Plastic pendants in primary colours hang over granny’s sitting-room standard lamps. The walls are similarly random; flying ducks, patches of 1950s homage wallpaper and the odd Tretchikoff-style print in the style of Miss Wong. The reading matter is catholic. It’s the only cafe I know where you can read The Morning Star as well as the standard dailies.
Spoon is an accommodating establishment that doesn’t force you into a three-course formal meal straightjacket. There are good things to eat throughout the day but you can just have a drink if you like. The food veers from the homely – cottage pie with Guinness – to the ever so slightly nostalgic: Scotch woodcock, scrambled eggs with anchovies and caper berries, rice pudding with marmalade.
The kitchen clearly subscribes to the philosophy of pioneering chef Fergus Henderson that “if you’re going to kill an animal, it seems only polite to use the whole thing”, hence the menu is studded with gutsy dishes using secondary cuts of meat. Warm, tender and velvety pressed ox tongue dusted with flaky sea salt was fine with its salad of lamb’s lettuce and bulbous caper berries, though a runny salsa verde would have been better still. A special of calf’s head braised with carrots and served with sauce gribiche was not for the faint-hearted. It offered different textures of meat, melting, sometimes chewy but too many dauntingly gelatinous parts. It needed refining.
I liked my bruschetta, decked for winter with soft butter beans cooked with tomatoes and smoked paprika topped with roundels of spicy black pudding. A warm potato and cheddar tart owed its deep pungency to the use of Montgomery’s celebrated raw milk artisan cheese. A side salad of unseasonal green beans and rocket might have been improved upon but the rugged, hard-fried chips were fab.
Desserts and cakes have always been sound at Spoon. It does a great carrot cake with lime cream cheese topping, grown-up chocolate and lemon tarts and the odd enticing curiosity, like strawberry yogurt pie. But after our substantial cold weather dishes, it was lovely to eat a light and refreshing clementine jelly served with home-made langues de chat. (Just in case you were appalled, given the interest in offal, these were the classic French biscuits, not cat’s tongues. Even the most committed carnivore has limits.) Proper jelly is something I wish we saw more of in restaurants, a blessed relief from liver-inflating creme brulee and stick-to-your ribs nursery puddings. The hot chocolate fondant, of course, was rather more filling with its brownie-like crust cracking to reveal oozing dark chocolate lava. It was impeccably executed too.
I’ll be back to hang around in Spoon with my laptop, ostensibly to write a book, but really just to eat cake.
Spoon
6a Nicolson Street, Edinburgh
0131 557 4567
Lunch £7-£15 Dinner £10-£50 8/10
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