Angels with Bagpipes

High Street, Edinburgh

visited 3/3/11

This place is on the Royal Mile, right opposite St Giles, so I would normally have avoided it; such places tend to offer lowest-common-denominator Scottish food for tourists at a price. The twee name wasn’t encouraging either (it refers to a carving in the High Kirk) but I had heard good things of Angels with Bagpipes, so a group of us went to check it out.

It is quite expensive: main courses are around £18 with another £3 if you want spuds (either creamed or straw chips—the latter not very appropriate for most of the dishes). At this kind of price you’d want a bit of the excitement and attention to detail that AwB lacks. It has a number of different rooms: we sat in the back room where the laminate tables were very close together. The menu is pretty much what you’d expect from a Royal Mile Restaurant: salmon/venison/lamb/beef. None of these offers any very interesting variations. I had some very lightly smoked, but good quality smoked salmon with some ordinary bread, tasteless capers and a bland horseradish (if that’s possible) cream. Then a perfectly good dish of very well-flavoured lamb, nicely pink and tender, on cabbage and pancetta. Perfectly executed but the kind of thing you could knock up at home. The plates could have been a bit hotter. The wine list is disappointing—very short and with a hefty-looking markup. We stuck with cheaper bottles—a quite nice falanghina (one of the more interesting possibilities) and the house red, a disappointing Chilean cabernet sauvignon that managed to be both weedy and alcoholic. The service was friendly if a little chaotic.

All in all, pretty much as expected for a Royal Mile restaurant. Not bad, but you can get much more interesting food at this price by stepping off the tourist route.