Lunch Quest: Edinburgh

Freshly opened where Homes Bar used to be on Constitution Street, Leith Lynx promises locally sourced produce prepared with care by chef John Winnik. On Saturday, we heard via Twitter and Facebook that John had worked himself into the ground (almost literally) so we weren't entirely surprised to hear that he'd taken the day off (get well soon, John). So for the first day since they opened, they were without their head chef. What a perfect day for us to come and review!


The place is smartly decked out with intriguingly symmetrical artwork. The tables are simple and stylish, with a smart diner feel. The restaurant was very quiet, and bizarrely enough the only other folks there were friends of mine, recently moved to the neighbourhood.

I arrived a little early, on this occasion, as MJ was otherwise engaged (some lunatic notion of handing in her PhD thesis and creative bit on time, no less!), so I had the responsibility of taking the photos (hence the bad photos).

I was soon joined by Cake Quest's fabulous Sarah and my dear friend Janey Jane.

Our dedicated waitress soon took us through the dazzling array of menus. It being Sunday, they had both a lunch and an all-day breakfast menu, together with a specials board.


The specials board immediately won our hearts, with Sarah and I opting for the beef and Jane going for the home-smoked poussin.


The spale bone beef was first class. Two nice hefty chunks of it (none of this dainty slice malarkey) were accompanied by roast potatoes, glazed carrots, and a good sized Yorkshire, all combined with a measured amount of gravy. Sarah is northern so would have liked at least another dozen Yorkshires with it (as would LQ: Istanbul's Mina!) and perhaps a smidge more gravy. I thought the gravy was about right, and brought things together really well, but I agree that the beef to Yorkshire ratio wasn't quite right.


Jane did an excellent job with the poussin, picking the little blighter clean with considerable relish. She had nice stuffing and chipolatas, rather than Yorkshires. She felt that the smoking of the bird was a little too subtle, but was very happy with the dish, overall.

Dessert menus were soon forthcoming. Now, I'm not sure whether you've heard but I don't really do dessert, so I opted for the cheeseboard. Jane joined me in the pursuit of cheesy excellence, while Sarah, with her sweet tooth, opted for the sticky toffee pudding.


I was well-impressed with the look of the toffee stickiness. It looked very tempting and was delightfully plentiful. It certainly precipitated all the right noises, nodding, and smiling from Sarah.


The cheese board was good, with the cumin-laced chutney working particularly well with the Dunsyre blue.

We're usually a fairly abstemious bunch of Lunch Questers (we should get a collective noun for Lunch Questers, almost immediately. Perhaps a "crusade" or a "slaughter"?) mainly due to the fact that we tend to lunch during the working week. It being a Sunday, though, we thought we'd a have a little wine with lunch.

On the recommendation of our attentive waitress, we went for a Chilean pinot noir, which turned out to be a very good choice, and was made all the more enjoyable by the fact that Sarah had to watch on in sober anguish as she'd wrong-headedly decided to travel by self-steered automobile. The chaps at Vino, who supply the wines, seem to be doing a very nice job.


Overall, Leith Lynx is very good. You should definitely pay it a visit, soon. It provided us with an excellent start to our Sunday Roast side quest (onwards to , in a couple of weeks time) and I'd gladly go back to sample from their other menus.

Scores

Out of 20, Blythe scores Leith Lynx
4/5 for food
3/5 for presentation
4/5 for service
3/5 for setting
giving an overall 14/20

Leith Lynx
102 Constitution Street
Leith
Edinburgh EH6 6AW
www.leithlynx.co.uk

One of my work colleagues, Daniel, asked me a perfectly straightforward question, the other day, and I was pretty much stumped for an answer. The question was: "where can I get a good Sunday roast in the east of Edinburgh?"

You're not going to believe this: I managed to fashion an actual edible lemon tart!


I'm not going to claim it was an unqualified success. The pastry could have been much better, my niece and nephew both took one bite and refused to indulge further, and the expression on my mother's face when she was eating hers was one of abject disgust, but I thought it tasted great!


I was so pleased with myself and made free to dance a jig on the bar at the Port o' Leith, last night :-)

Now, as far as cooking goes, I definitely have my limitations. I’m pretty comfortable with soups and stews (I feel I can accurately season goo), but beyond that things start to get rather hit-and-miss.

Earlier last year, a couple of friends and I came up with a good way to try and
improve our skills, get out of our cooking comfort zones, and have oodles of fun: the
A-Z Three Course Challenge.

The principle is simple: each week get together, take a course each (rotating each
week), and put yourselves together a nice three-course meal. We chose to structure
it around the alphabet. For example, we started with Aubergine Soup (taste good,
look bad), Afghani Korma (richly spiced goodness), and Almond and Apple Cake
(sweet heavenly mouthfuls of delight), moving on to Bruschetta (simple elegance),
Beef Wellington (good beef, shame about the pastry), and Bread and Butter Pudding
(old school fun), and so on.

Along the way, we attempted some fairly tricky stuff: a goat’s cheese soufflé (rose
beautifully, but didn’t taste of much); duck with raspberry sauce (worked a treat in the end); and an incredibly involved recipe for southern fried chicken (artery-
hardening magnificence). There were hits (spicy king prawns, bitterballen, Eton
mess, gateau), and misses (sticky Guinness pudding, gumbo), mixed with a couple
of recipes that went straight in to the regular rotation (fishcakes, jumbo cheese straws).

From A-K, there were no outright disasters.

We were beginning to feel like cooking immortals: invincible, indestructible,
incapable of failure. But fate was saving up a culinary calamity in luscious lemony
form – the classic lemon tart.

The details are still too painful to recount at length, but the outcome – a biscuit,
loosely trapped in partially cooked scrambled eggs – will live on in infamy.

Cooking disasters are inevitable and humbling, but that doesn’t make them any
easier to swallow. The emotional scars run deep, but I feel after a couple of months
of healing that I’m just about ready to attempt to address this fruity farrago.

So, dear readership, what tips can you pass on to ease my way through the lemon
tart mine-field? I feel I need to build up a groundswell of support before my next
attempt.

Should I seek sponsorship and donate the proceeds to other sufferers from lemon
tart trauma syndrome or other epic food failure disorders?

All thoughts welcomed.