Borough, 50-54 Henderson Street, Leith 0131 629 2525
Lunch/Dinner £18-38
Food rating 5/10
"Egg, mushroom & kale 8"? This sounds more a till receipt than a menu, no? Or what about "Pigeon, beetroot & black pudding 18"? Okay, the ampersand adds an ornate hint that this is a restaurant dish with a bit more complication to it than the bald three-item list might otherwise suggest. It’s a symbol that allows us to pin all our hopes and dreams on the impression that behind this curt description lie all manner of intriguing, skillful operations that will render the said ingredients reliably pleasing. An absentee pounds sterling symbol tries to neutralise the commerciality of this restaurant. It says: "Forget about the cost; focus on the food."
Menus written in this shorthand way theoretically have much to commend them. No trios of salmon caressing avocado mousse on watercress foam, then, none of this dated, stuffy pretension. No clubby use of the international gastronomic world’s lingua Franca: you don’t need to understand what "Brunoise", "Béarnaise", or Bisque might be. In that sense, these cryptic dish titles are democratic and inclusive. You can participate in the experience without being fluent in the language of Escoffier.
But sometimes the looseness, the vagueness of these staccato descriptors turns out to signify the un-joined-up-ness of the chef’s thinking, flagging up a relatively random, whimsical juxtaposition of ingredients. They give chefs a free pass to be inventive, when in truth, most chefs cook best when their creativity is grounded in established culinary principles.
And this is the trouble at Borough, once family home to Norn, still occupying the matrimonial home following a split. The decor, slightly altered, suggests that temporary confusion that follows a bust-up: you listen to contemporary hip hop while looking at the Visit Scotland wallpaper, a weird mix of cool and square. And the food is strange.
Clear lamb consommé coats the lips with a fatty film; it has a strong lamb flavour but it’s slightly sour. Raw peas and near raw broad beans float in it, as if summer had strayed mistakenly into winter. "Broccoli, hay & liver" amounts to spears of griddled purple sprouted broccoli in what tastes to me like Hollandaise, with a dehydrated brown crumble on top, allegedly liver, which tastes how I imagine peat might if you blitzed it in a food processor. Where’s the hay? I can’t say. It passed us by.
Now there’s a small tart, pretty, bedecked with nasturtium leaves and flowers, but anodyne. Courgette, even the less ubiquitous yellow type, doesn’t have a fat lot of taste; it needs a lot of help from herbs, tomatoes, garlic or something. Under the courgette there’s a green and mercury (possibly olive) purée. This tart is all about looks, not taste. And if this dish disappoints, "oyster, tomato & bone marrow" almost repels. Cucumber, with no more to recommend it than the standard hothouse type, sits on an oily, smoky-tasting tomato broth, over slippery cut-up oysters and skinned, oddly acidic baby plum tomatoes. No one really wants to finish it.
"Tagliatelle, mussels & gherkin" amounts to a clump of overcooked pasta (rolled too thin, and probably made with the wrong sort of flour) in a vaguely fishy sauce. The bivalves, chopped nuggets of orange flesh isolated from their shells, lose most of their appeal. Gherkin? You’ve guessed it: a jarring waste of space. Simmering resentment bubbles to the surface with the best dish, "sea trout, cauliflower & truffle". Nice fish, well cooked, but it measures around two-and-a-half square inches. Its vermicelli-like grey stuff is fresh truffle, presumably, but it has no truffle aroma or savour. "20" for this midget offering? By now all I can think about is the missing pounds signs.
The berries in the "strawberry, goats milk & sorrel" dessert are so sub-standard in flavour terms that anyone who had bothered to taste them should have looked for a substitute. Their sorbet has the subtlety of bubblegum. "Gooseberry, bay & sorrel" equates to raw gooseberry halves, what tastes like a pile of half-baked, anaemic crumble, something jammy yet acidic (possibly sea buckthorn reduced almost to fruit leather consistency), powdery meringue with green stuff on top (sorrel?), and something that tastes like frozen whipped cream.
There are menus that indulge chefs’ creative fantasies, and this is surely one of them.
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