Gorse, Edinburgh

The haar is a quirk of regional geography and climate, a sudden dense sea fog that rolls in off the east coast to change your springtime plans quicker than you can say ‘I knew I should have brought a jumper’. But approach it from the other side, arrive in the haar and watch it clear, and it’s like watching a city or a coastline come back into focus, emerging from the mist into the spring light. Arthur’s Seat has not vanished forever, we will have a barbecue as soon as all this stuff dries out.

We’re heading across the Meadows to Gorse, a new bakery that takes its inspiration from the culinary localisms of Northern Ireland, and at 9am on a Friday morning it’s buzzing in a way that only a hyped new bakery can be. Inside, it’s a lovely mix of pared-back speciality coffee chic and some cottagecore touches to soften it up. We’re talking concrete banquette seats round the edges with a half-height linen curtain on the window; a single tone colourwash with tile detail, but it’s custard yellow for the paint and jammy red for the tiles. The space is pleasingly, surprisingly spacious with loads of light pouring in, and a genuine, actual view of the Crags out the window.

The coffee is from the excellent Established Coffee in Belfast – our flat white (£3.90) comes in a white handleless mug that looks a bit like a very fancy egg – and the counter is loaded with bakes, pastries and cakes that take influence from Northern Irish food culture and move them into some unexpected areas.

First up, something fairly straightforward – a cinnamon cruffin (£4.50) which is absolutely enormous. This thing comes in hard with the cinnamon sugar, but also with a lovely, almost caramelised outer crust. As something to get you out of bed in the morning, it’s very impressive, while the next item might make you think you haven’t fully woken up yet.

The Tayto Cheese & Onion pastry (£4.95) is quite something. On first glance this is a puffy, light, delicate pasty dome topped with extremely fine shavings of cheese and some delicately cut green herbs. Bite into it and it’s a bit like stuffing a scone, a croissant and half a bag of crisps in your mouth all at once. This, to be clear, is unambiguously positive – it’s one of the best things we’ve eaten in months. Extremely savoury, gloriously cheesy, absolutely delicious, and a tiny little bit ridiculous. It’s dreamlike both in the sense of being good, and in being slightly untethered from your usual expectations of reality. ‘You can’t put crisps in a pastry’, well not with that attitude you can’t. Also, where did you find those particular crisps?

The Fifteen Danish (£5.50) is another pastry taking a Northern Irish cult classic and applying it to a pastry situation. A Fifteen is a traybake made up of digestive biscuits, glacé cherries, marshmallows, coconut and various other bits and bobs; here, it’s deconstructed and then reconstructed almost immediately with more elements. It's a Danish pastry filled with a cherry jam, and sprinkled with desiccated coconut. That’s topped with a digestive-type situation, and then on top of that sits some light, fluffy Swiss meringue. Oh, and some freshly foraged edible flowers.

In truth, it’s a bit overengineered, the kind of treat that looks incredible but becomes something of a challenge when it comes to actually eating it. Each individual component is great: there’s a lovely flake to the pastry, the meringue and cherry balance each other perfectly, and if overambition is the worst thing you’re accused of, you’re doing a lot of things right.

And Gorse is doing a lot of things right. The ambience is great, the coffee is lovely, the bakes are exciting and interesting. Scotland's relationship with Northern Ireland is, I would argue, too complicated to précis in the final paragraph of a bakery review, but one thing I do know as a part-Irish, part-Scottish person is this: Scottish people, by and large, don't know a huge amount about the island of Ireland. One of the joys of food is the way it can make you think about culture, about history, and about the ways that we all interact (or don't) with one another. If any Tayto crisp-inflected pieces of viennoiserie can nudge folk through the fog into thinking more about some of their closest neighbours, Gorse is where you'll find them.

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207 Pleasance, Edinburgh EH8 9RU; Wed-Fri 8am-3pm, Sat 9am-4pm
@gorseedinburgh on Instagram