Itri

Gilmore Place, Edinburgh

visited 18/5/11

It’s hard to find a really reliable Italian restaurant in Edinburgh since the demise of the late, lamented Frankie’s. The Valvona and Crolla Empire spreads ever outwards with its business plan of importing really good ingredients that you can buy at a fair price in the shop and then serving them up with minimum attention to detail and poor service in their many over-crowded restaurants at a very, very stiff mark up. Apart from this there are a bunch of standard places with massively long menus and an approximation to proper Italian cooking.

Itri, in Viewforth, has been getting good word of mouth so I rounded up some friends and went to check it out. It’s a modern but comfortable room with space between tables and friendly service. It has a well-focused menu and well-sourced, good quality ingredients.

The menu announces that a dish of sauted seafood is a speciality and most of us went for that as a starter. This was a generous amount of small but sweet clams and mussels, some tender squid, and some overdone prawns all in a really excellent broth of white wine and garlic with a kick of chilli and some nice garlic toasts (we could have done with a few more of these). Next-—for your benefit, dear readers—-I wanted to try a number of dishes so waited to see what everyone else would order. This meant I ended up with chicken with goat’s cheese and peppers—a very nice piece of flavourful chicken with the other ingredients just kind of ...… there. I also tried a very well executed mushroom risotto, some nice meaty sausages, and aubergines stuffed with mozzarella and peppers (these rather approximately assembled on the mushy aubergines. For pudding we shared various kinds of ice-cream, all fine.

With all this we had some of the kind of wine that’s exactly right for a neighbourhood restaurant—inexpensive, fruity and well-balanced. We had a Venetian sauvignon blanc (not very Italianate but delicious) and a nicely-rounded Nero d’Avola.

Itri is pretty much what it says it is—an honest family restaurant that doesn’t stint on the ingredients. If I lived next door I would eat there all the time.