Otro
22 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh
0131 556 0004
Lunch/Dinner: £12.95-£38
Food rating: 4/10
WHEN I was a child, my father took me for Saturday treats to that great Glasgow institution, Tam Shepherd’s Trick Shop on Queen Street. Whoopee cushions, fake turds, Dali-esque handlebar moustaches, itching powder (that evil stuff!), kid-on blood, jumping spiders, disappearing ink – we built up quite a collection of jokey junk, doubtless making our own little contribution to the economic might of China’s plastics and chemicals factories.
Fake fried eggs were a firm (no pun intended) favourite, the pleasing squeak of the uncuttable egg, and those few seconds of incomprehension before adults realised that they were being japed. So when an egg that looked fit for Tam Shepherd’s window stared up at me from my "confit duck hash cake" at the newly opened Otro in Edinburgh, it took me a trip down memory lane. A sprinkling of chives gave it a 21st-century makeover, but as my dining companion was quick to note, it still looked spookily unreal. To be fair, duck egg albumen does have a tendency to rubberiness. I hear that they’re good for making meringues, otherwise you put up with the white for the sake of the velvety yolk. Only in this rendition, the yolk was the consistency of beeswax, so no help at all for the tepid hash with its oafish garlic butter taste, which, along with unbearably vinegary, coarsely-cut red cabbage, obliterated the taste of the bird.
Quite a disappointment, coming from the team behind the successful New Chapter. Although in retrospect, while I had a very good meal there soon after it opened, my judgement was partially influenced by the extraordinary value it represented for its modest price tag. The cooking at Otro oscillates between crudely tasty at best and way off-kilter at worst. And these are not bargain prices. Mind you, all those hungry tourists taking advantage of a weak pound will scarcely notice.
Firm, grey, salty boluses of flat-tasting fishiness are not my idea of "smoked mackerel rillettes", and sandwiching them between discs of fibrous black radish doesn’t improve matters. A green oil of indeterminate identity pretties up the plate, but balls of watery cucumber prove another deterrent to pleasure that a sprinkling of toasty, blackened puffed grain, and roasted hazelnuts, can’t quite make up for.
By comparison, we’re relatively ecstatic about the brimming bowlful of Shetland mussels in a copious, creamy, smoked paprika and bourbon sauce that’s thick with diced shallot (or onion). True, you can’t really taste the bivalves as such, although they bring sweetness to the proceedings, and the mittel-European character of their sauce is probably better suited to poultry or pork.
On enquiry I learn that the sea bass is farmed, so I opt for coley given the same treatment, "with salsa verde on a warm chickpea, chorizo, and wild garlic salad". But the kitchen’s vinegar problem is on display again; this time puce-coloured onions lead the acetic assault, obliterating our taste buds for wine. The chickpeas are soft in a manner reminiscent of the tinned sort, no heinous crime there, but the chorizo, in its spongy brightness, doesn’t sing out top quality either, and we have to assume that the salsa verde must be the green squirt that rings the vinegary orange liquid below. I find solace in the tapering halves of pink fir apple potatoes that are roasted in duck fat with caramelised onions. This side order is better than either main course.
Desserts – a warm mandarin cake with chocolate ice cream and orange custard, and a praline brownie – are sweet enough to send a sharp spike of insulin surging into the bloodstream, so anyone with a sugar habit will probably like them. The mandarin cake is cut in an ungainly way and served in a bowl better suited to breakfast cereal. That orange/mandarin flavour is over-the-top, like eating straight marmalade peel. The brownie would provoke a sugar rush in its own right; the crunchy sugar honeycomb, praline mousse, brandy snap cracker and vanilla ice cream that flank it collectively constitute a prescription for hyperglycemia.
Perhaps opening another restaurant, a capacious one at that, is putting too much strain on the cooking side of the operation?
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