Bags of taste with dash of confusion
Fabulous produce risks being ruined by sketchy instructions
The Gardener’s Cottage, at the bottom of Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, reminds me of Stuart Little’s house. The charming mouse lived in a quaint family home squashed in between two faceless modern buildings.
Ed Murray and Dale Mailley’s restaurant is also a sweet and incongruous throwback to a different age.
In the green space between Royal Terrace Gardens and London Road, they have renovated a building, revitalised a herb and vegetable garden and created a gourmet canteen where diners share trestle tables and eat exquisite seasonal food.
It’s one of the capital’s many small, heavily booked, set menu restaurants that have languished, univisted, on my to-eat list for years. Now, with the advent of lockdown and the eat-at-home boom, I can finally see what the fuss is about.
I can also, after the headbursting experience of getting a seven-element meal on the table, appreciate a little bit of what Ed, Dale and their team do in the kitchen.
Dinner for two comes in a matching pair of branded cotton shoulder bags. One contains the less perishable items, mainly baked items and booze. The larger one holds a giant wool-insulated envelope. In its depths is a giant ice pack, plus all the fresh food in vacuum packs. There are also three crib sheets – a menu, instructions and some notes from Dale. Phew.
Come time to prepare dinner, I tried to match the packages with the menu and the instructions.
Was I being filmed for some kind of fiendish foodie version of Candid Camera? Where was my snack of crispy chicken skin? What did the black crackers accompany? And, most terrifyingly, which vacuum bag of yellowish grey matter was the artichoke puree and which one was the elderflower cream?
Sensibly, I held off on pouring the gorse collins, the aperitif, until I had done my best with everything else.
This was a tall glass of uncharted territory – an Edinburgh-brewed spirit, Escubac, gorse syrup, tonic and plenty of ice. With a few slivers of soft sea trout to keep it company, I did not miss the chicken skin one bit. There was also a dinky boule of sourdough, with fine olive oil and dukka to dip it in, and a bouttle of Cave de la Couvette, a lip-smacking unoaked chardonnay, once the cocktail was finished.
So far, it was a fair approximation of being in a restaurant. Then came the official starter, beef tartare with wild herbs. I assembled the vacuum pack of chopped steak and sachet
of esoteric seasonings (pickled morels, fermented wild garlic buds) and arranged it as best I could with the wild herb salad.
It still looked like a raw burger strewn with weeds. Carb Boy shied away from the plate.
I liked it very much, piled on a rye cracker, with a spring of fat hen as a garnish. The organic meat melted into the spicy, oily dressing and the garlic buds gave it a caper-like bite.
But – Ed and Dale, look away now – Carb Boy fried his.
Halibut is the kind of restaurant fish that I’ve very much missed in locked down months. This was a beautiful piece, farmed in Gigha, poached in butter and seaweed. A fat langoustine, cooked with fennel fronds, sat on the top.
I managed to heat the summer truffle potato terrine and pheasant back mushrooms in the oven for the allotted time, and very good they were too. I even dotted the liquid, shellfish-scented sauce around the plate in a rough approximation of the beautiful presentation of a Gardener’s Cottage level restaurant.
Then I almost went and ruined it all by adding curdled elderflower cream instead of gently warmed artichoke puree. The two bags were almost identical and I picked the wrong one. Luckily, I tasted before adding.
Carb Boy, who was spared the sweaty stuff, declared it all delightful, much appreciated the truffled tatties, loved the fish and looked longingly at my langoustine after he had scoffed his own.
The elderflower and strawberry tart had a custard rather than cream base. So what. It was a remarkably resilient dessert, surviving a 50-mile drive, a day in the fridge, then an unscheduled bath in boiling water. The pastry was crisp with ground almonds, the strawberries had all the lush sweetness of high summer.
But it was a relief to get to the chocolate almonds, which asked no more of me than that I tip them out of the bag.
This was a splendid dinner and a welcome return to halibut after months of supermarket salmon. But I wouldn’t give a chef a carrier bag of words and expect them to write an article.
I struggled to assemble even these stellar elements into a restaurant-standard meal.