Photo of
August 12, 2013
[Steak is on the menu at Twenty Princes Street][1]
Steak is on the menu at Twenty Princes Street

The 5pm Restaurants blog is delighted to see that Edinburgh’s joiners, plumbers and sparkies have been kept busy creating lots of new bars and restaurants recently.

Hoping to make a big splash among the newbies are Juniper bar and Twenty Princes Street restaurant. Both ventures are housed in what used to be the Royal British Hotel. The building is part of the Cairn Hotel Group which recently announced that they were going to revamp four of their hotels after securing a multi-million pound financing deal with HSBC.

Apparently, the Princes Street hotel is to change name but the new one has yet to be made public.

Alaskan king crab

Twenty Princes Street restaurant is a light, airy space with fantastic views over Princes Street and across to the castle. Scottish seafood and dry-aged Scotch beef from the Castle Mey Estate are the backbone of the menu along with dishes like the foraged mushrooms on toasted spinach bread with poached quail’s eggs.

Some of the dishes are pretty darn exotic. Fancy a starter of Alaskan king crab with chilli and tomato sofrito, Stirlingshire crème fraiche and fennel-salted straw potatoes? Yours for a tenner.

Sleek bar

The adjacent bar is a sleek affair with an extensive cocktail list and what it labelled as a street food menu. I get the street food thing when it comes to the chips and the salt and chilli chicken wings.

However, it must be a pretty upmarket street in which the vendors also sell lobster sub and Scotch eggs made with Rannoch venison and accompanied by a smoked tomato mayonnaise.

Perhaps there’s a clue on the bar’s website which states that ‘At Juniper we’re swanky, but in an inclusive way – making you feel posh without being intimidating.’

[Cocktails come with a view at Juniper][7]
Cocktails come with a view at Juniper