Alexander McCall Smith: Restaurant review

Whighams Wine Cellars
13 Hope Street, Edinburgh (0131-225 8674)

THE Bill

Dinner for two, £46.25, excluding drinks

I get very few invitations to dinner. I sit at home, waiting for such invitations, and none come – or almost none. Occasionally people say, "We must have you round for dinner" and I reply, "Thank you very much. I look forward to that." But they don't mean it, and the invitation never arrives.

So, in this bleak state, a telephone call from the editor of this great magazine inviting me to review a restaurant is tremendously exciting. It is a major salience in a social calendar as flat and empty as King John's in Milne's King John's Christmas ("and sometimes no one spoke to him for days and days and days…") Review a restaurant? Why, of course. How about tonight? Will that be too late?

We decided to go to a place that has been around for a long time, Whighams Wine Cellars, a venerable Edinburgh institution in Hope Street, at the west end of Princes Street. Princes Street, as we all know, is an environmental and cultural disaster, full of standard-issue, homogenised shops that, frankly, hardly add distinction to the principal thoroughfare of Scotland's capital. However, the streets around it still have some character to them, and Hope Street is a pleasant little street that has pretensions to being Charlotte Square, but is not quite. There used to be a firm of lawyers in Hope Street whose notepaper said Hope Street, Charlotte Square – a nice example of aspirational geography. Whighams is Hope Street simpliciter, but provides a useful place to eat or have a glass of wine if you are in Charlotte Square, perhaps attending that annual culture-fest, the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

It is a wine bar first and foremost, but the restaurant side of its business has expanded with the recent creation of a bright new area furnished with beech and therefore rather different from the old cellar part. The combination meets harmoniously in the middle. If you want to sit in one of the wonderful old cellar snugs, you can do so. But if you are feeling bright and beechy, then you can sit in the new part. They both work well.

It is a busy place. Do not go there if you want a quiet time. It is not a place for Trappist monks. The people who go to Whighams are people who have something to talk about, and the din is something awful. Yak, yak, yak. We went on a Friday night, which is apparently a busy night, and there was a vast number of people known as thirtysomethings, all talking about themselves. During the day, Whighams is largely populated by people sometimes rather curiously referred to as suits. These may be anything from twentysomething to fiftysomething, or even beyond.

For a wine bar, the menu is very good indeed. It changes regularly, although it did not change while we were there; in some restaurants that actually happens, as the menu mutates before your eyes with the intonation by the waiter or waitress of those great and terminal code-words soff (anglice: it's off), and slunch (anglice: only served at lunch). Some of the Whighams courses are justifiably famous. These include their seafood platter, which comes in two sizes. I chose the smaller one, which costs £15.95, and which was of generous dimensions by any standards. But more of that in a moment: first courses first, and in my case that was cock-a-leekie soup (£3.50), while Elizabeth chose crayfish tails with lemon and mustard dressing (£5.95) – she then went on to fillet of beef stroganoff (£10.95). There is not much one can say about cock-a-leekie soup: the real issue is the freshness of the vegetables, and these were certainly fresh. So that was fine, as were the crayfish tails, even if there was rather a lot of onion in the salad. But you don't have to eat everything.

Now, back to the seafood platter. This was very good indeed because everything was extremely fresh, and identifiable for what it was. Some seafood platters contain objects of indeterminate and disturbing shape: this platter required no guessing. And compared with the measly portions that some restaurants serve, this seemed very good value indeed. So if you want a bit of seafood, served quickly, in comfortable, intimate surroundings where you can talk to friends and choose a glass of wine from an extensive and extremely reasonably-priced list, then Whighams is the place. It is also the place if you want a very generous cheeseboard (£5.95) or sticky toffee pudding (£3.95) and, at the end of it all a cappuccino (£2.30) served beautifully with just the right foamy top. Ambrosial. Very good.

Obviously, they take their wine seriously. When I asked for advice on what glass of wine would go well with the cheese, the Sicilian waitress fetched Michael Back, a young man from the wine-producing Margaret River area in Western Australia. Michael works part-time at Whighams and knows a lot about wine. He summoned up a glass of Margaret River Palandri (£19 for the bottle). It was gorgeous, and went very well with the goat's cheese, Cooleeney, Dunsyre Blue etc on the plate.

I would sum up Whighams in these terms: it is a smartly-run place with some atmosphere. The food is straightforward, unfussy and fresh. It is not expensive and the generosity of its portions, both of wine and food, is striking. It fully deserves its recognised place on the Edinburgh map.