Patina Bakery, Edinburgh

If Edinburgh Park is a place at all, it’s an almost entirely liminal one. It has next to no history (the business park was founded in 1995) and very little life outside of office hours, but is almost comically well-connected to the rest of the city. You’re most likely to see it hurtling away from town on the train, or rumbling towards the airport on the tram, off somewhere new. It’s a transitional zone. It’s ‘on the way’ to other places. It isn’t really anywhere.

Onto this blankish slate arrives Patina, and it’s a truly impressive undertaking – it’s a cafe and a bakery with a pastry focus, and somewhere in here there’s a bar and restaurant which also does gigs. Patina comes to town courtesy of the team behind Kiln, an excellent bar and restaurant in Newcastle which itself doubles as a working pottery. Truly, these folk love to multitask.

Inside, Patina is equal parts flashy and homely. That means enormous Romanesque columns out front, and massive windows for catching the golden hour light and seeing through into the working bakery. It also means dangling pendant lamps for brightening the place up the rest of the time, some classy Scandinavian-inflected design, and a pleasingly cosy feel. There’s plenty of gold detailing, and the tableware is excellent – all well-hewn ceramics and hefty coffee cups. An accidental recent research trip to Kiln suggests that these are from the restaurant/pottery on Tyneside (then the ‘Newcastle’ inscription on the bottom gives it away).

The staff are all incredibly helpful, whether it’s the counter staff talking everyone through the extensive bakery counter or the staff member literally walking from table to table handing out free buns. Back at that counter, it’s an impressive array of sweet, savoury, sticky and sandwichy. The almond croissants are supremely gooey and absolutely loaded with almond paste, while the pain au chocolat has the classic combo of a thin, shellac-like outer layer with a soft, buttery inner. Many layers, all delicious, hard to fault.

The bread is also delicious – the seeded sourdough bounces and crunches in all the right places with a pleasing tang – and the doughnuts have a truly impressive amount of jam squirrelled away inside them. The coffee’s great, and we don’t get a chance to try the pasta but it does look pretty impressive on its way to the next table over.

Interior view of Patina Bakery

An awning outside boasts that this new bit of Edinburgh Park will have a million square feet of office space and “1,800 diverse and affordable homes”, which is an interesting choice of wording we can get into later. The point is there is clearly a lot of money flying around this part of western Edinburgh, and now all that gold and those columns make a bit more sense. At the moment, it’s some half-empty office space, a hastily-assembled padel tennis court, a Premier Inn in the middle distance, slightly too much public art and some very nice pastries. It’s a bit like playing a new video game on a very old computer, waiting for the rest of the environment to load in.

Patina is an excellent bakery staffed by lovely people, and it’s a warming refuge from the drizzly ghost town vibe outside, but it is the kind of spot that raises more questions than it answers. Back in the real world, patina is the sheen that comes with age – the wear on a well-used handle, or the scuffs on a dinner table that come together to form a new top layer. It’s a sign of life, of a worn-in object that has its own history and story to tell. Whether it can be applied directly to something brand new remains to be seen.

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3 Airborne Place, Edinburgh, EH12 9GR; Wed-Sat, 8am-4pm