What looks to be a split panini, toasted, a small tomato, halved, a clove of garlic, partially peeled, is set before us. Now I get it. Casa Mara is meant to be Edinburgh’s new taste of Catalonia. Its romantic genesis, according to the website, is a homesick Catalan chef aiming to bring his mother’s cooking to windy Scotland. So this is ‘pa amb tomaquet’. I’ve made the connection with the small bowl of olive oil that’s on the table: you’re meant to rub the exposed end of the garlic clove on the bread, do the same with the tomato- until it turns into a rosy mush, sprinkle it with salt and olive oil. But I do wonder if some diners might be puzzled, and wonder why it costs £3.80.

Obviously a little table-side tuition if required could clear up the mystery but already it’s evident that the front of house service here is not polished, and as our meal goes on, it becomes irksome: the chorus of needy ‘How is your meal?’ flags up inexperience. Depending on who’s serving you, communication here oscillates from irritatingly chatty to language-challenged functional.

Trinxat, described as a potato and cabbage cake with Iberian ham on top, amounts to a tepid bubble and squeak that hasn’t been fried up long enough. Its un-warmed plate doesn’t help, another indication of inexperience. The ham though has the requisite lacquered, bull’s blood coloured salty-sweetness. Flashing red lights are activated by the misspelled ‘muscles en salsa marinara’, described as mussels with peppers, onions, almonds, and parsley. I hadn’t spotted the homonym earlier because the fire exit signs are the brightest thing in Casa Mara, otherwise the lighting is low. But ‘muscle’ turns out to be apt. Three, just three, supersized, rubbery mussels attached to their shells by tough suckers look nothing like any Scottish mussel that I have ever seen. Spain has a reputation for trawling the world’s seafood supplies and passing much of it on in frozen form. They look like New Zealand green-lips to me, strangers in these here parts, but then in the UK there’s no legal requirement to put an asterisk next to frozen ingredients on a menu. Their brick-coloured sauce adds nothing further to justify the ‘marinara’ tag, or the mention of peppers; it taste more like fish soup from a bottle, diluted, and crushed nuts.

We try, we really do try to like Casa Mara’s fideua- Catalonia’s pasta version of seafood risotto- but what looks like spaghetti has been more burnt than toasted, and the seafood (squid, prawns, scampi, mussels of normal proportions) has had a personality bypass. It’s hard to place the flavours in the fideua liquid, other than they have a murky, fried quality. This liquid may be the same as what coated the three muscles, lending an upfront saltiness that obscures everything else. Once again, it’s tepid.

By this point, we have psychologically opted out of this meal. How much longer to we have to go through the motions where one act is worse than the one before? But we have, adventurous souls that we are, ordered the pig’s trotter cooked in white wine, tomatoes and onions. It costs £14.25, and so so given that butchers more or less give them away free, I had been expecting to be dazzled by their painstaking preparation, their Catalan authenticity. But this is another salty gloop, this time with blobs of shuddery skin and what looks like thin strips of dry, stringy pork escalope in it. It’ll take a lot of persuading for me to try this speciality again.

We can’t complain about the Santiago tart- its fresh- just it custard, which is a bit lumpy with a bossy presence that is more limoncello than lemon. The crema Catalana is downright mean, the clay dish must hold all of four shallow dessertspoons of saccharine-sweet lumpy custard that isn’t even set. It’s been warmed by last minute blowtorching or grilling. Ironically, the temperature of this cold dessert is higher than the hot dishes that preceded it.

Oh, to have the sun-kissed, sea-lapped cooking of larder in Scotland. May it happen soon.