Wahaca

16 South St Andrew Street, Edinburgh

0131 202 6850

Lunch/Dinner: £11-£25

Food rating: 6/10

I DON'T buy the claim that edible insect protein is the new, benign way to feed the population. Grimly industrial, intensive insect breeding “farms” hold up to 100 million crickets at any given time. What could possibly go wrong, apart from a biblical plague of mutant crickets, or some such pestilence? And gastronomically speaking, my personal insect taste trials have been off-putting. The first time I ate a “gourmet” cricket – coated in soy and ginger I seem to remember – its scratchy extremities stuck to my throat, which only returned to normality many glasses of water later.

My second, and probably my last, experience of entomophagical dining was at Wahaca, the newly opened Mexican eatery in Edinburgh. I spotted a hyperactive red “New” in italics beside the “cricket brownie” made with “gluten-free ground cricket flour”. Initially it tasted like a rather good exemplar of its type until I became aware of a dusty residue that coated the mouth and gullet. This was how I imagine ashes from a fire might taste, or a watery concrete mix. Why ruin good chocolate with this novel powder, fashionably gluten-free or otherwise?

Wahaca is a chain, of course, with 25 branches by my count, and our meal was a parable on the chain effect: a concept that starts off fresh, promising and independent gets picked up by the money men and modulated to suit the bland requirements of big business. I’m fond of El Cartel, the small Mexican restaurant that’s only a stroll away from Wahaca, but I hope it never gets big and loses its edge, because that’s what happens with chains, and this Wahaca is no exception.

Now, none of this might matter to you if you’re there for throbbing, colourful Latino atmosphere, labour-intensive cocktails, and you’re aged 20-35, relish shouting over din, and thrilled by the thought of downloading the Wahaca QuickPay app so you can lop 10 minutes off your waiting time. In which case, a bowl of tortilla chips with a tablespoon of guacamole and a quesadilla that doesn’t cost more than £4.45 might be just what you’re after. In fact my meal suggests that the “nibbles” and assorted street food are a better bet all round than the “bigger food” options, not least because they don’t come with the same bolt-on wadding of the latter. But I’ll return to that.

Hand on heart I can say that I really liked the soupy black beans (frijoles), largely because of their cap of pungent oil flavoured with sobrasada-style sausage made by the estimable Monmouthshire charcuterie company, Trealy Farm. Winter vegetable tacos stuffed with Savoy cabbage, mushrooms, and Borlotti beans combined the brassica whiff of the greens with the fruitiness of mild Pasilla chillies. Crisp fried sweet potatoes stopped being more than fattily sweet when you got down to the bits coated in mojo de ajo (caramelised garlic sauce), although it needed more (any?) of the citrus customary in this recipe to give it an edge.

Amongst larger dishes, tender, deeply meaty bavette steak, marinated overnight in fiery Pasilla de Oaxaca rub, with its melted cheese crust and a tomato-y, smoky chipotle salsa on the side, represented good value, even allowing for the fact that its “green rice” was too dull to eat. It reminded me of par-boiled Uncle Ben’s, and try as I might, I couldn’t taste fresh, vivid coriander and parsley in it. I found it hard to believe that my grilled cod fillet was actually cod; I have a photo of this thin, un-cod-like specimen. Its bland Guajillo and parsley pestos lacked any vibrancy, almost as if they were pasteurised. Apparently the pork lost in our burrito amidst the dreaded rice was “cooked for hours in a Habanero chilli and Achiote [spice paste] marinade” but it packed less punch than a wraith.

If you do visit, I’d give those cricket brownies a miss at dessert and go for the churros and chocolate. These thin horseshoes of salty, hot batter, fried hot and crisp, dusted in sugar and cinnamon, with a deep, dark chocolate sauce to dip them in, are quite wonderful of their kind.