Montrose, Edinburgh

Welcome to 2024, where times are, have been, and will presumably continue to be tough. Still, the minimum wage is going up, and that’s something; from April, it will be £11.44 an hour. It’s something we’re always aware of when writing about food and drink with the expectation that, to a greater or lesser degree, people might a) read about a place and b) actually go to it. That’s why we put the prices in reviews – that’s what we paid for it, and soon you might do the same. After all, there’s a difference between a dish being nice, and being ‘an hour and a half of your time’ nice.

We’re keeping these issues in mind on our Thursday night trip to Montrose, the new venture from the folk behind the fantastic Michelin star restaurant Timberyard. It’s in the former Century General Store at the top of Abbey Mount, with a tasting menu restaurant upstairs and a cute, atmospheric wine bar downstairs. It feels laidback but refined, trendy and homely – fancy but not uncomfortably so. That fanciness extends to one of the best things we’ve seen in a restaurant in ages.

Wine by the glass is often made to seem like a cheap relation compared to getting a bottle, giving it a funny little sip then waving it around like an aristocrat at the end of the Grand Prix, but Montrose work around this with two simple tricks. One: use really nice wine that comes as a bag-in-box. Two: get loads of tiny little carafes. Our £6 glass of Poivre D’ane comes with the full wine theatre you normally only get with a full bottle, including the chance to have a sip then nod and say "yep, that’s pretty good." If going out is your treat to yourself or a pal, you want it to feel like a treat – turns out that tiny glassware hits that mark pretty spectacularly.

Photo by Abi Radford

The deviled eggs (£4) are also a nice little treat, but they’re gone in a flash. A good squidgy texture, not too heavy on the trout roe, a tickle of spice – folks, that’s how you devil an egg. The crudités (£8) are a source of some debate, not least because they are crudités, and they’re £8. There’s some very nice stuff going on here; fans of colourful turnips will have a field day, there’s fun to be had in picking through the colours and shapes on offer, and the pickled pieces are nicely balanced and not too sharp, particularly what we assume is radicchio although it was slightly too dark to really tell. The sesame and almond dip is excellent, but then this is a small plate with some bits of veg on it, and it’s £8. This could just be sticker shock – combine that £8 with the £10 we drop on an outlandish dinner plate covered in salty, fatty but pleasingly mellow coppa ham and it does kind of balance out. At the same time, it’s £8 for crudités. It is delicious, you have been warned, let’s move on.

Stepping into the bigger plates, and things get a bit more spectacular. The Shetland blue mussels with shoestring fries (£16) looks incredible – a collection of shelled mussels drenched in spiced butter, topped with a miniature haystack of wafer-thin fried potatoes. Did we think we’d need to use the phrase ‘high camp moules frites’ this early in the year? Nope, but we’re glad we had it ready. It’s earthy, spicy and savoury, and the potatoes hold their crunch and oomph under some very buttery circumstances.

As for the game sausage (£20), boy oh boy. For starters, this thing is seriously hefty, and it sits on a throne of the best take on pasta and pesto you’ve ever had. Fregola are little balls of pasta, so they keep their bite when they’re flopping around in incredibly unctuous sausage fat, kale and garlic. The sausage is the star of the show though – all black pepper and char, supremely juicy and unstoppably, almost unconscionably meaty. A carnivorous delight.

The pear frangipane tart (£9) brings things home in style. It’s supremely buttery, the pears are sweet, soft and almost caramelised, and as we dig in, an ambulance goes whipping down Abbeyhill with the sirens on, temporarily bathing the entire room in flashing blue lights. That sums up Montrose really – comfy, cosy and expertly put together, with some moments of flash and unexpectedness that leave you wondering quite what’s just happened. Trust us when we say that not only is Montrose worth the hype; it's worth your time and money.

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1 Montrose Ter, Edinburgh, EH7 5DJ
Wed-Fri 5pm-12am, Sat-Sun 12pm-12am
montroserestaurant.co