Worth its Salt for brunch brigade
Artisan butcher and baker wife serve up cracking plates of food
It’s hard work being the social secretary. But when you eat out for a living, and friends want to meet up for food and drinks, everyone looks at you. Or in my case, me.
Which is how I found myself looking for a brunch venue for an exceptionally picky senior and a friend with a tiny baby who is either asleep or latched on to his mother.
It had to have room for a pram but not, if possible, dogs or people on laptops. These bring out Nippy Sweetie’s most acid tendencies. It’s hard to enjoy a bougee breakfast when your guest’s face could curdle the coffee.
Salt Café, in Edinburgh’s smart Morningside, does not mention a nae-dugs-naecomputers policy on the website. But they do stress being breastfeeding friendly. Crossing my fingers, I booked for three and a half and requested space for a pram.
Salt has been on my radar since it opened in 2020. When an artisan butcher with a Michelin-starred CV and his baker-cum-eventorganiser wife open a café, I want to see what they’re doing.
Breakfast and brunch, as anyone who has catered for the morning masses in their own kitchen will know, is not easy. There are so many moving parts – eggs poached, scrambled or fried, bacon crispy or soft, weirdos who insist their beans must not touch anything else on the plate.
But when it’s done well, it is a real treat. And, spoiler alert, it is done well here. Very well indeed.
Nippy bagsied the butcher’s breakfast, a meaty line-up designed to showcase co-owner Steve Connolly-Bastock’s skills with the carcase. He clearly takes huge care with the bits he can’t make himself, sourcing the fruit pudding and haggis from The Fruit Pig Company in East Anglia.
I’m sure Steve ranged across the country comparing pigs’ entrails but they were my least favourite elements. As a MacSween fan, while they no longer make haggis down the road in Bruntsfield, it comes from closer to home than the Fens. I would have prefered their haggis on the basis of taste as well as food miles. As haggis is a
very personal preference, I didn’t mention any of this to Nippy.
Unusually, she was delighted with everything. The banger was, she claimed, the most sausagey she had ever tasted. I could not disagree, it was porky perfection. The bacon was just crisp enough, with curled edges like a pig’s tail. No horrible white liquid seeping out of this prime cut.
The egg, from the excellent Corrie Mains Farm, had a yolk that was almost orange. The Sriracha beans – in a ramekin in case of customers even more fussy than Nippy – had a gentle kick rather than a hot chilli punch. The excellent sourdough toast came with The Edinburgh Butter
Company’s cultured butter. She loved it all and that’s not something I can type very often.
Old Chum got stuck straight into her mojito fritters before the baby – Wee Chum – woke up. These health-giving pancakes, stuffed with fermented veggies and spring onions, seemed tailor made for a
new mama. Adding a poached egg, avocado and perfectly griddled halloumi created a perfect plate for someone up all night feeding an infant and eating Jaffa Cakes. It even looked healthy, strewn with bouncy watercress and green oil.
My brunch, the greengrocer’s breakfast, was also vegetarian. In a Venn diagram, it would sit in the intersection between Nippy’s and Old Chum’s. Present and correct were the egg and haloumi from the former plus the beans and toast from Nippy’s plate.
My bonus items were sweet roasted cherry tomatoes, a pleasingly grainy meatless sausage plus a tangle of fried chanterelles. I have brunched in some of the finest establishments known to humanity and no one has given me wild mushrooms before. An oversight other cafés should put right as soon as possible.
Another takeaway for other caterers is this: don’t give your customers so much food that they can’t manage a smackerel of something sweet for afters. When there is something called “lost bread” – French toast made with exquisite brioche – on the menu, this would be a crazy move.
We cut a single portion into cubes, anointed it with more cultured butter and ordered more coffees. It was more like a celestial bread and butter pudding than the eggy bread I made the kids when I was too tired for fish fingers. A feeling of sated contentment descended on the table.
This was not a budget brunch. But most of us don’t eat fried brioche every day. If I am having something wildly decadent, I want the cultured butter, the sauteed chanterelles, the full works.
Salt makes the social secretary’s job seem easy.