BONNIE AND FORTH

The Mystery Diner visits new East Lothian hotel The Bonnie Badger – the fifth establishment in chef Tom Kitchin’s burgeoning culinary empire

The mystery diner visits Tom Kitchin's latest offering, The Bonnie Badger in Gullane

Back in November I visited Tom Kitchin’s fourth Edinburgh opening, the Southside Scran, and loved it. This wonderful little restaurant just off Bruntsfield Links has an incredible amount going for it. The food was just how I like it: bistro grub with random Gallic flourishes, fused with local ingredients that provide an indelible link to terra Scottica. The decor is contemporary but timeless. As ever, the curly-haired wunderkind has got it just right, notwithstanding the obligatory warning about his feisty pricing.

Head chef and longtime Kitchin collaborator Craig McKenzie has done a very solid job, and in many ways this felt like a younger version of Kitchin’s self-styled ‘neighbourhood’ restaurant cum gastropub, the Scran & Scallie in Stockbridge.

This was installment four of the Kitchin experience. With its opening, what started out in 2006 with Kitchin’s eponymous establishment in Leith – which quickly gained a Michelin star – had ballooned into a four-restaurant group made up of the two Scrans, Castle Terrace and the flagship of the group, The Kitchin.

But having taken over 12 years to get to four restaurants, within weeks another new Kitchin enterprise was seeking our attention. However, the Bonnie Badger, which opened in East Lothian in December, is a departure from the established format. For a start, the place is not in Edinburgh and it’s not just a restaurant. When Kitchin took over the Golf Inn on Gullane’s high street (there are 22 courses in and around the village, including the Open Championship venue of Muirfield), they gutted what had been a fusty old establishment built in 1836 and seemingly unchanged since that date. It was, to put it politely, in dire need of lashings of TLC and mountains of cash.

Where previously all Kitchin ventures had been dedicated restaurants (the Scran & Scallie claims to be a gastropub, but isn’t), they have now effectively moved into the hotel business, although it is characterised as a pub with rooms when it’s actually a restaurant and bar with rooms (aka: a hotel). The place is a tardis which contains a genuinely pub-style bar, a games room with poolo table, television room, private dining area, and an outside area with firepit and bar that will be outstanding when the sun shines. It also has 12 rather lovely bedrooms (five of which are in two cottages in the grounds) which are priced from £195 to a mind-boggling £595 a night.

The first thing that strikes you about the whole place is just how exquisitely it has been done up,

and the second impression is that the pared-down decor, with its bare floors and dark walls, is classic Scandi-chic. That, it turns out, is hardly surprising given that the whole renovation project was overseen and masterminded by Kitchin’s Swedish wife and chief collaborator Michaela.

That theme has been continued in The Stables, the restaurant we had come to review. What had once been a pokey, low-ceilinged room, had had its ceiling removed to create a wonderfully high room with a beamed roof clad in tongue-and-groove. With the exposed brickworks, wooden floors and centrepiece fire, the 60-cover dining room felt far more open than any of Kitchin’s other eating spaces.

The menu also felt less financially daunting than the Southside Scran, with the mains starting from £12.50 and seven of the ten main courses costing £16.50 or less. There were also selfconscious nods to pub grub through dishes like fish ‘n chips, steak pie and bone marrow, ham and egg with chips, fish pie, and beef sausage with lentils.

This, it turned out, wasn’t reflected in the food, which was right up to Scran standards. After chomping on some tasty crackling strips and crispy, latticed pig’s ear, we launched into starters of dressed crab with avocado and sour dough toast, and an onion soup with ox tongue, cauliflower and raisin off the specials menu. The obviously very fresh crab was perfectly executed but the real star of the show was the onion soup. Forget consomme-style French onion soup, this was a creamy, saucy veloute with gratifyingly rich, deep flavours.

Both our main courses came off the specials menu and were well conceived and executed, if perhaps lacking the x-factor of our soupy starter. There was nothing to choose between man-sized helpings of cod with mussels and smoked haddock and butter, and the pork belly with mash, black pudding and apple. Beware of silky-tongued waiters selling extra sides though: we couldn’t manage the chorizo potatoes we were sold.

Pudding was yet another demonstration of unflashy competence leavened by the odd flash of brilliance. The warm apple and almond tart with vanilla ice cream was worthy of any Parisian patissier, but the combination of meringue, yoghurt and the glorious tartness of sea buckthorn elevated this dessert to a higher plane.

All in all, this was a thoroughly enjoyable outing. The service was slick and unobtrusive, the environment convivial, and the opportunities for people-watching manifold. By the time we had added in a bottle of house white (£26) and service, the price for a threecourse meal for two had come to £125, which makes this a very singular pub.