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MEDITERRANEO 159 Ingram Street, Merchant City, 0141 552 0460, www.mediterraneoristorante glasgow.com, £11 (bar)/£18 (restaurant) Mario Romano’s umpteenth venture in the city, Mediterraneo is proving immediately popular with a wide range of diners from shoppers to ladies who lunch to families. Serving simple, assured Italian cooking from its centre-piece kitchen with attention to detail and quality ingredients, this is a large, lively and convivial restaurant with a Champagne bar on the side and an outdoor terrace coming shortly. Edinburgh
THE WATER OF LEITH CAFÉ BISTRO 52 Coburg St, Leith, 0131 555 2613, www.thewaterofleithcafebistro.co.uk, £10 (lunch) Ana and Mickael Mestle have begun to carve out a niche as a loveable local café serving uncomplicated but honest food, combined with a role as a well- earned cake and coffee stop by the Water of Leith Walkway. Decorated in a sunny yellow shade inside, Mickael Mestle’s classic French training peeks through in the menu which mixes light lunch options such as soup, quiche or croque monsieur with blackboard specials such as braised pheasant casserole. THE WEST ROOM 3 Melville Place, West End, 0131 629 9868, £10 (lunch) / £14 (dinner) Not where Jonathon Woss heads for a comfort break, but a new bar in the former Halo premises in the West End of Edinburgh from the team behind sygn and Monteiths. Oversized lampshades, funky stools and strange, wall-mounted half-sofas give the
12 THE LIST 3–17 Dec 2009
place a determinedly style-driven theme. A large choice of ambitious bar food includes posh Scotch eggs, seafood stovies and a fish finger sandwich. SANTO’S BISTRO 23 Canning Street, West End, 0131 228 6298, £7 (lunch) Into a former car garage in a West End back street comes this new café-bistro with an Italian theme from Rosario Sartore (of Broughton Street’s Bella Mbriana) and his wife Maria. Still awaiting its drinks licence, the bistro is a daytime affair for now, and weekdays only at that, but there’s a decent range of sit-in or takeaway options ranging from soups, pizza or stromboli to fuller dishes cooked by the chef at his main restaurant, such as meatballs, or gnocchi with cream, mushrooms and sage.
THE GATEWAY Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Arboretum Place, Inverleith, 0131 552 2674, www.gatewayrestaurant.net, £15 (lunch) The smart first-floor café-restaurant in the inspiring new John Hope Gateway visitor centre at the west gate of the Royal Botanic Garden. With its serious breakfast/brunch offer, full lunch menu and wine list, the airy, modern Gateway is geared towards a proper sit-down meal rather than coffee and cakes after an arboreal stroll.
Full independent write-ups on all the restaurants listed here can be found on our online Eating & Drinking Guide, list.co.uk/food-and-drink. Prices shown are for an average two- course meal for one.
SIDE DISHES Donald Reid gives advice on how to eat out for charity and avoid the Bernard Matthews turkey with a gastro Christmas
■ When VAT goes back up to 17.5% it’ll add a wee bit to eating out – £1 to a £40 bill. That happens in January, but before then there will be a lot of eating out, and a lot of spending in restaurants. During that time the StreetSmart scheme will be operating in various restaurants around Edinburgh and Glasgow, with £1 added to bills in participating venues and the money raised donated to local homeless charities. In Edinburgh, where some 75 restaurants
take part, £23,000 was raised last year with a significant chunk of that going to Fareshare, the project run by Cyrenians to redistribute around seven tonnes a week of surplus food from supermarkets and retailers to 40 homelessness projects. They also run cooking classes for those returning to their own permanent accommodation. Many restaurants do their bit for good causes: the Wee Curry Shop (pictured) on Byres Road in Glasgow and Hanam’s on Johnston Terrace in Edinburgh, for example, run monthly events in support of chosen charities, while staff from Malmaison and Hotel du Vin have just raised £100,000 for the Elizabeth Montgomery cancer charity by walking the West Highland Way. Eating out is an extravagance, and Christmas can highlight the material and social inequalities all around us. But decent food – at whatever level – should be available to all, whatever their circumstances. A pound each time you eat out this December isn’t really taxing.
■ It has been said that we’ve lost touch with seasonal eating but that’s probably less true at Christmas than at any other time. However, it’s easy to be blown off course by the barrage of national marketing, so a few reminders of what seasonality really means in our own neck of the woods are welcome. The Foodies Christmas Festival at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh over the weekend of 5 & 6 December is playing its part with an array of local producers and chef demos from the likes of Paul Wedgwood, Mary Contini and Tony Borthwick (pictured).