Igg's

Jeffrey Street, Edinburgh

visited 12/09/2009

I've been meaning to report on Igg's for a while, and this seems a slightly unfair visit to blog, but here goes: Igg's is a fairly upmarket Spanish restaurant. It always has an interesting menu, a good wine list, and is a friendly place with reliable cooking. The room does not pander to any particular trends but is a warm, comfortable place with its own style.

On this occasion we were told we could only have a table at 7.15 as they were busy, which is fair enough. When we arrived, a big party, seemingly of rugby players, was in full and noisy swing. But we had a table in the other wing of the L-shaped room, and soon had a couple of glasses of really excellent cava (from a bottle opened at the table--good sign), some great bread and oil, so all was well.

The menu seemed a bit less adventurous than on other visits, and gone was the taster place of fantastic tapas to share. I had lamb's kidneys with little mounds of mash and crispy pancetta in a sherry-ish sauce. All fine: the kidneys were sweet and tender (and not at all amoniac). My companions had a dish of rice and squid in squid ink which the squid had been chopped to the size of grains of rice and was thus invisible and hard to taste. The real problem was that we had to wait 50 mins for these and another lengthy wait ensued before further rations were supplied. By then we had polished off most of a bottle of (very good) Roija that we'd ordered for the main courses.

These were disappointing and not up to the standard of previous visits. I had tuna--I was happy to agree to this being served rare and disappointed when it wasn't (at all). Otherwise it was a very nice dish with a lovely slowly-roasted piece of fennel and a pesto sauce, a very good meeting of flavour. One of my companions had a pork fillet that was dry and suspiciously cool, as if it had been sitting around, and was not good. The vegetarian option looked a bit cobbled-together to me, but I didn't try it. After this we had some almond cake, which is always on the menu and is very good--moist but light.

By this time many tables were getting restive about the slowness of it all and the maitresse d' did the rounds apologising in a frank manner, which worked well, and taking the wine of the bill, which worked even better. She said she was new to the job, was appalled by the current way the room was managed, and would Sort It Out. She also told us to come back in "a month or two" but whether she thought the sorting would take that long, or that this was an appropriate interval between restaurants I don't know.

So I urge you to try Igg's in the coming weeks and post comments below.