After my month-long spring break I went back to Edinburgh for ten days to study. In those ten days I had the opportunity to eat at many places, so I've dedicated this post to memorable places I've eaten in Edinburgh. Warning: this is another post that's only interesting if you're going to Edinburgh. With that said, here's the list.
Best Eateries in Edinburgh
Snax Cafe
Above: Snax Cafe's won my heart.
Snax Cafe is the place to eat if you're a student. I can't recommend this place enough. The atmosphere is really chill. There's always some music playing in the background and every time I've been there it's been packed with college students.
And it's packed for good reason, because the food is filling, delicious, and inexpensive. The first time I went I had a turkey, cranberry, and brie panini with a heaping pile of fries for under five pounds. All that and I got free, unlimited ice water from the cool college waiter. By the end of the meal I was stuffed and my wallet didn't feel that much lighter. Snax Cafe is a place you must visit if you're in Edinburgh.
Metropole Cafe
Above: Metropole Cafe wins the best waitstaff award.
I went to the Metropole Cafe after a bit of internet research, and I wasn't disappointed. Metropole Cafe has fancier food at reasonable prices. When I went there I had some nice crab cakes for around 7 pounds. But the real selling point of Metropole Cafe is the waitstaff. They're quick servers and good for a chat, and are genuinely nice people.
PieMaker's
Above: PieMaker wins the best Owner award.
PieMaker's serves delicious, savory meat pies. They serve southwest chicken pies, steak and ale pies, kidney and bean pies, you name it. Affordable and filling (if not healthy), I would have gone to Piemaker's everyday if it wasn't so far from Pollack Halls.
The best part of Piemaker's for me was the owner. He knew Sara and me, and whenever we went to Piemaker's together he always gave us freebies. The first time he gave us a free pie he was experimenting with. Another time he made us fresh British pancakes free of charge. The owner was a smart guy though, because giving us all those freebies turned us into repeat customers. Very enjoyable experience.
The Dogs
Above: The Dogs wins the best pleasant surprise award.
The Dogs was a restaurant I did not know about until I went there to meet some of my dad's friends, Mr. and Mrs. Boyd. When I went there I had a duck egg, haggis, and potato dish that was amazing. The Dogs began in Edinburgh and now has several locations in Edinburgh. If an outsider asked me which single restaurant has delicious, real Scottish food, I'd choose The Dogs.
Vittoria's ice cream bar
Above: Vittoria's ice creambar wins the best ice cream award.
Vittoria's ice cream bar has a great variety of luxurious ice creams. It was there that I discovered banoffee pie ice cream (it's banana ice cream, with dulce de leche sauce and shortcake crumb). That's now one of my new favorite flavors. Other flavors I liked from Vittoria's include peanut butter crunch, creamy hazelnut truffle, stracciatella, and caramelita (caramel with fudge bits). Vittoria's is my favorite ice cream parlor in Edinburgh, and I've been to many.
WildFire
Above: Wildfire wins the best affordable fancy food award.
Wildfire is an upper-crust type of restaurant. Fortunately it has a reasonable 10-14 pound three-course lunch menu with steak (which is cheap for Edinburgh). Most importantly, it has a good three-course meal, which is hard to find in Edinburgh. Go there for dinner though and it will really cost you.
My favorite dish from Wildfire was actually their profiteroles. Profiteroles are French cream puffs. Here they were covered with a thick fudge sauce and served with vanilla ice cream inside each profiterole. It was my favorite dessert in Edinburgh.
Good Joints for Staving off Hunger
Here are some places that I ate at often, and are quite good as well. They just weren't excellent enough for me to call them the best of Edinburgh. Since I don't care as much about these places, I'll just briefly go through them.
Above: Chocolate Soup wins best chocolate award.
I only know Chocolate Soup for it's chocolate shot, which is a cheap shot glass full of molten chocolate. But I've seen many people here ordering other desserts, and have heard good things about their shakes and sandwiches.
Mathieson Bakeries
Above: The other meat-pie place.
One pound Scotch Pies makes Mathieson a keeper. Matheison has several convenient locations, and when I didn't feel like walking to PieMaker's, Mathieson's was always there.
Kebab Mahal
Above: Affordable Indian Food.
Kabab Mahal had a great food/price ratio. Only place I could get fried rice for 2 pounds a plate. Kebab Mahal's was always packed, so if you crave Indian, it's probably the place for you.
Marmaris
Above: Great Comfort Food.
Marmaris is open late and has good kebabs/pizzas/fries (I mean chips). The food's fresh, and they're also open at late hours (which is really nice for those late night cravings). I'd suggest the chips and doner meat.
Biblos
Above: Biggest Discount Award.
Biblos offers bar food (hamburgers, sandwiches, fries, steaks, and drinks) at a 30% student discount. That's all that's really special about this place.
Nyam Nyam
Above: Italian food in a convenient location.
Nyam Nyam replaced a Baguette Express shop that I really enjoyed, but fortunately Nyam Nyam was also a good restaurant. I had a special bacon and egg pizza that only cost 2 pounds, which was a steal.
Above: A Bacon and Egg Pizza. I don't know what I should have expected.
City Restaurant
Above: City Restaurant is the most American restaurant in Edinburgh.
City Restaurant has a nice breakfast, and relatively cheap actual pancakes. It's more of a greasy spoon than a restaurant though. If you want an American breakfast (with haggis), this is the place to go to.
Disappointing Restaurants
Here are some restaurants that made me feel ripped off when I was done with the meal. If you want to have a bad opinion of Edinburgh's food, come to these places.
Il Positano
Above: Overpriced and Mediocre.
Il Positano would be good if you took all the prices and divided them by two. This place calls itself an Italian restaurant, but the bread didn't even come with olive oil. If you want real Italian food, I've had people suggest Bella Italia.
Monster Mash/Mums
Above: Just bad comfort food.
Sara and I went here because of Mum's slogan that they had "Great Comfort Food." Now that I've eaten there, let me say that their slogan is a lie. Mums and Monster Mash have expensive, unsatisfying comfort food. All their food looks like it came from a can, and a pie Sara ordered didn't even have any pastry crust (they used mashed potatoes instead). This was the first place I ever tried haggis and I almost hated it because of this first experience. Fortunately I've tried it again at other places with much more success.
Places I Hate
These are truly despicable places that should be avoided at all costs until they go out of business.
Miro Mexican Cantina
Above: Terrible.
Now this place had good reviews online, so I feel I have a duty to thoroughly explain just how bad it is. Let me go through my single, unfortunate dining experience at this "restaurant."
First, the special of the day was a duck taco with a salad and rice, so I decided to give it a shot to see if I would be pleasantly surprised.
Above: Microwaved tortilla and rice.
I was surprised, but it wasn't pleasant. The salad was dry, the tortilla was microwaved instead of grilled (really?), and the rice was the worst rice I've had. The rice tasted like cafeteria white rice with red peppers from elementary school, and it was shaped like a cup instead of a natural pile. I hated every inch of this plate.
Deciding I might have just ordered a bad dish I stupidly decided to order dessert. I went with key lime pie, one of my favorite desserts. What a mistake.
Above: Trash.
Instead of the Floridian key lime pies I've come to love, I was given a frozen key-lime pie covered with sour, canned berries. After I finished eating here I was in a bad mood which ruined the rest of my day.
Vittoria's Restaurant
Recognize this restaurant from above? I specified Vittoria's ice cream bar for a reason. After Sara, Jordan and I ate several times from Vittoria's outdoor ice cream bar, we decided to try out the restaurant inside. What a terrible decision.
Above: Worst Waitstaff Award.
In Edinburgh it's common to find generally lazy and disinterested waitstaff. But Vittoria's restaurant brought that to a whole new level. Right when we came in the waiter at the front asked us in a thick Italian accent if we had a reservation. He was so hard to understand that Jordan (a linguistics major) thought he was asking us if we wanted a table (don't ask me how she heard this). So after some somewhat comedic exchange of words, we finally landed a table, with a warning that we'd have to get out of there quickly. One waiter then agitatedly took our coats.
Since they wanted out of there so quickly, we decided to not order a meal and skip to the desserts. When we told our first waitstaff this, she gave us a strange look and asked us if we were sure. Yes, we were sure. She then took away our menus slowly, making us feel extra awkward. Then our next male waiter came over and asked us if we were ready to order dessert. When we said we needed some more time, he said, "Ok, I'll come back later. Actually, I'll just wait here until you figure it out." So he loomed over our shoulders while we picked desserts under pressure.
Eventually we got our desserts and ate them, and admittedly the desserts were good. But when we were finished a different waiter started to give us back our coats. That's when he asked us who owned "the ugly green jacket."
.
..
...
EXCUSE ME!? Are you talking about my favoritist super-duper green jacket!? I was ready to cut his head off.
Above: Bryan in an awesome jacket, ready to behead some Vittoria's waiters.
With that final insult, Vittoria's restaurant made it to my most hated restaurants list. Only come here if you enjoy being insulted. No amount of good food can compensate for the world's worst waiters.
So that's my list of the good and bad places to eat in Edinburgh. After I took my finals it was time to say goodbye to Edinburgh forever and take my last trip to Paris. Instead of going straight to Paris though, I decided to first take a four-day detour in London. So next up, get ready for Big Ben, Britain's gory history, the Doctor Who Experience, and more!
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