Whirlybird, Edinburgh

Famous cities have an interesting relationship with their residents. For one thing, those residents are constantly changing and rotating, forever getting into arguments with one another about who’s more ‘real’. But the iconic cities of the world also exist as entirely separate entities in the minds of visitors and admirers from afar; someone who's dreamed of visiting your town for decades is not fussed about the fact that they used to take the bins every Monday, or that the bus tracker app was better three or four versions ago. Instead, these are the semi-mythic places where towers from the movies poke out of the skyline, where history lives on in the present day, where certain people wrote certain books that we don’t like to talk about in these pages thank you very much.

All of which brings us to Victoria Street in the middle of a mini-heatwave, and to a seemingly endless dribble of visitors to Edinburgh getting their photos taken and exploring some of the buildings which may or may not have inspired locations in the aforementioned series of books. A brand new addition to Victoria Street’s run of multicoloured shopfronts is Whirlybird – billing itself as a ‘modern tavern’ and launched by a team with a pedigree that includes stints at Hawksmoor, Panda and Sons, The Kitchin and Herringbone, it’s an interesting take on the kind of all-day venue that almost needs to appeal to everyone at once. In our hour-and-a-bit inside, we overhear a group of Jordanian tourists having a coffee, two hospitality industry folk swapping war stories, some marathon runners, and a reasonable number of small children. Like we say, everyone at once.

Inside, Whirlybird is full of lovely little details, from a tile mosaic in the entranceway to draping plants hanging off the walls, and a slightly labyrinthine split level layout. There are tiles, there is exposed brickwork, and there’s a coolness and laidback air to the place that’s pretty refreshing. Then there are the big windows which flood the place with light and offer observers a front row seat to the goings on of the most Instagrammable street in this particular bit of Edinburgh.

Image courtesy of Whirlybird.

As for the food, the menu pulls a lot of riffs on the classic ‘Scottish pub that does a nice lunch’ playbook. For one thing, there’s a lot of fish and seafood – given that it’s about 25 degrees outside, we forego the bowl of chowder we’d had our eye on and go instead for a very very nice smoked mackerel salad (£9). It’s delicious and surprisingly hefty, with each forkful revealing some new pocket of flavour or another big chunk of smoked fish. The smoked almonds scattered throughout give little pops of colour and punctuate the dish nicely, and there’s another wedge of mackerel, lovely stuff.

The garlic and rosemary grilled chicken (£18) for our main is extremely juicy – when your head chef used to work at the Hawksmoor, you should be able to cook a piece of chicken, and these, lads, are some well-cooked pieces of chicken. Brilliantly fatty with some lovely charred spots from the grill, there are juices running all over the place, and half a grilled lemon to just fire all over the shop like a bottle of champagne at the end of a Grand Prix. The apple and fennel slaw on the side is a little bit too creamy and quite a bit too salty so clashes with the rivers of lemony chicken fat, but when you get a side order of supremely crunchy fries (£5) and chuck those into the poultry zone, it makes for a pretty tasty bit of lunch.

From the perspective of a twenty-year Edinburgh resident who eats somewhere new every month for work, Whirlybird is nice but not hugely exciting. But here’s the thing: I’m the odd one, as that is simply not how most people interact with food, or with a city. For everyone else – the visitors, the tourists, the work lunches and the pre-gig pints and nibbles – Whirlybird is a very nicely turned-out space with a great feel, loads of room and a menu that should appeal to pretty much anyone. As we’re paying up, a nine-person e-Bike tour rolls down the cobbles through the Victoria Street crowds in what can only be described as a disasterclass in forward planning. Couldn’t be us, but everybody sees this city differently, and Whirlybird seem pretty well-placed to get plenty of those disparate groups on board.

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36-38 Victoria St, Edinburgh, EH1 2JW; open daily 9am-late, lunch midday-5pm, dinner 5-9.30pm
whirlybirdedinburgh.co.uk