Iglu

Jamaica St, Edinburgh

visited 8/4/2009

I have decided to check out more New Town/Stockbridge places and this is the first in my quest. Iglu has almost everything right to be a great local place to eat. A cosy, stylish but unpretentious dining room, charming service, a really well-designed menu, and pretty good ingredients. Sadly, this is all betrayed by the most important thing of all: the cooking.

The ingredients seem pretty well sourced, and everything is wild or organic. Rabbit, wild venison, and wild boar all feature. I started with a pretty good piece of smoked trout which came on an underflavoured kind of potato cake (chives not much in evidence) and a couple of salad leaves--it need some more herbs to lift it and a little dressing or sour cream to cut through the dryness of the dish. Then I had wild venison which remained tender despite the lacklustre treatment it had been subjected to. Allegedly medium rare, it was grey and clearly cooked at too low a temperature. Beetroot is a wonderful accompaniment to venison, but needs to be cooked slowly--these were too crunchy and the sweetness hadn't been allowed to develop. It's a root vegetable after all. Needless to say I dug into everyone else's and can recommend the boar burger with proper chips.

I persisted with pudding and had an overly gelatinous pannacotta. Pannacotta is one of my favourite things, as it's such a pure expression of vanilla and I don't like it mucked around. This was advertised with apricots and brandy which I thought might come as a compote but it was just bits of dried apricot stuck into the pudding.

There are some reasonably-priced house wines but we had a bottle of so-so NZ pinot and then decamped to the wonderful Kay's Bar round the corner for a whisky.

I really want this to be good. Perhaps Tuesday is not the best night to dine there (they don't open on Monday) so I might give it another go. I can't help feeling that the simple expedient of a different chef might do the trick.