Café Fish

Circus Place, Edinburgh

visited 19/7/11

Edinburgh has a number of fish restaurants and by and large they are not great (the wonderful Ondine excepted). Cafe Fish treads a tricky line between the extravagant restaurants that are all oysters and halibut and the ones that do a pot of mussels and coley and chips. The menu is divided into dishes that come in under the £22 for two courses, and those with a supplement, but they might just as well have priced everything separately.

I started with grilled sardines with a pesto crust, a nice flavour combination. The sardines were correctly cooked but quite small and without that petrolly shininess that very fresh sardines have. Then I threw caution to the winds and had the grilled sole (£6 supplement). It was a decent piece of fish, very plainly cooked, with a lot of samphire and 3 boiled potatoes. Now I'm all for not mucking about with fish but this was a little extreme and needed some sort of inventiveness to set off the fish. I even had to borrow someone else's lemon. There are other restaurants who could do a much more interesting sardines and sole for £28 and Cafe Fish needs to decide exactly what its market is.

We had a good bottle of grecanico (from the ever-reliable Planeta) and the wine list is generally thoughtful and interesting (though our first choice already unavailable from a short list) with a reasonable markup.

The service started off attentively but tailed off at the end. The room is a converted bank with no attempt to change the accoustic so you can't actually hear anything anyone says to you unless they are facing you.