For the third year, Edinburgh’s Restaurant Festival is up and running with a packed programme of special dinners, selfie-powered lunch giveaways and wallet-friendly menus.
Running until Sunday 16th of October, the festival wants to encourage diners to step away from their usual roster of restaurants and try something new.
Over 30 of the city’s restaurants have signed up to take part in this year’s Festival. Your blogger sampled several of them as part of a Moveable Feast media event last Thursday evening.
Our scoffing safari started off in Veeno on Rose Street. Just opened in August, it’s a wine bar where most of the wine is supplied by the owners’ Sicilian vineyards.
As well as being big on wine tastings for two to 200 people, they specialise in aperitivo – after work drinks fuelled with spuntini snacks.
Imported Italian ingredients
At Veeno, they like to keep their spuntini authentic and import rather more-ish ingredients such as Calabrian nduja, Ligurian olives and salami from Milan.
Appetites whetted, it was on to Cadiz, the new Mediterranean seafood restaurant on George Street.
They cure their own salmon around these parts. More specifically, they cure it for three days using, among other things, lots of gin.
Top it with avocado purée plus a slice of pink grapefruit and you have a light but taste-bud tingling starter.
Now, there is another Moveable Feast event taking place on Thursday 13th October (it sold out within two hours of going on sale last week) so we won’t spoil any surprises by detailing all the stops.
However, we did drop by The Pompadour by Galvin where Exec Chef Fraser Allan had put together a simple, delicious dessert comprising mandarin sorbet, choc creme and fragments of honeycomb.
As we mentioned last week, The Pomp is running a Meet the Supplier dinner, also on Thursday 13th October.
Picture this: a free lunch
Already proving popular is the Festival’s Let’s Do Lunch challenge. Each weekday morning, a table and chairs, branded with the Edinburgh Restaurant Festival logo, appears in a different city centre location.
To be in with a chance of winning lunch, members of the public are invited to take a selfie and post it using the hashtag: #EdRestaurantFest
The full programme is available here.
