Leven's

Leven St, Edinburgh

visited 21/09/2008

Leven's has a lovely feel. It's well designed in cool grey and green and they try very hard to please. I dropped in for a quick dinner on Sunday and it was a good experience on the whole. But they need to sort out what they're trying to serve. It's billed as "Thai Fusion" but don't expect the kind of West Coast American cooking that inspired this cuisine. We made a mistake with a lettuce salad flavoured with a gunky kind of plum sauce and not great prosciutto and parmesan. A bad sino-italian fusion and the raw materials weren't right to start with. This isn't fusion, it's two sets of incompatible ingredients. Much better was a well-cooked piece of cod, with a nicely crisped skin, sweet beetroot, crunchy beans, and a lightly-pickled cabbage. They didn't quite blend, but it was an interesting and well executed dish inviting you to move between the flavours. I had a glass of the excellent, limpid Sauvignon Blanc.

I'll give Leven's another try, but they need to think a bit more about what they're fusing.