August in Edinburgh and the city centre is thronged with culture vultures keen to get their fix of the arts.

But it’s not all about the Royal Mile and the clusters of venues around George Square and George Street.

There is life in other parts of the city and it doesn’t involve student mime acts or Mongolian throat singers.

Leith Chophouse

In Leith, a new steakhouse is quietly taking shape. Leith Chophouse is billed as a bar and butchery and promises ‘steak and cocktails by The Shore’.

The new venture is on Constitution Street in the premises which once housed The Leith Lynx bar and kitchen.

The 5pm Dining blog has a sneaking suspicion that there may have been another business on the site in between The Leith Lynx closing and the proposed launch of Leith Chophouse.

However, if there was another venture then it gave up the ghost before we had a chance to get down there.

Anyway, the new Leith Chophouse is aiming to open to the public mid-September.

It’s run by a team with a proven track record for navigating the capital’s often treacherous eating and drinking scene.

They already have Sygn, The West Room and Monteiths on their collective CV.

Diners can look forward to beef which has been butchered and dry-aged on the premises before being cooked over an open flame charcoal grill – a technique which looks likely to supersede the Josper as the most on-trend cooking method du jour.

The Wine Press

If you can’t wait until September to try somewhere new then you could always pootle up to Dundee where The Wine Press has been finding its feet on Shore Terrace.

It’s a wine bar with one of those clever Enomatic machines which allows customers to drink really quite special wines by the glass.

Apparently, the place used to be called Legends, an old school boozer. How the good people of Dundee will take to a smart wine bar with ambitions might be interesting.

Even the local evening newspaper – a breed which is usually supportive of new ventures on their patch – rather snidely announced that Legends was to re-open as a ‘swanky wine bar’.

We’ll drink to that.