Festival Edinburgh - Food fail - Sept 2013

The joy of Fest...

Edinburgh has some proper restaurants. Some superb local ingredients cooked by some of the finest kitchens in the UK. I could wax on about the delights of the Leith seafood scene and it's recent renaissance, I could talk about the elegant and romantic Witchery (or it's recently lauded little sibling, The Honours). I could talk about David Bann's hearty vegetarian food, the innovative delights of 21212, Tom Kitchin's eponymous place and fish masters Ondine. I could give a few lines on the multitudes of bistros that have popped up recently serving cut back mod Scot menus comprising the finest ingredients the Islands, Highlands and Lowlands can offer.

I could tell you all of this. Though, it'd all be from someone else's experience. I could tell you all of this. Because I read enough to know about it.

I can give you chapter and verse on the places I've been meaning to go to, but in a 16 year history of coming to Edinburgh religiously every summer, often for 2, 3 or more weeks at a time, I can't have had more than 5 or so 'proper' meals out. When I say proper, I mean planned, "that sounds nice, we should definitely go there sometime", meals out. Rather than, "urgh, I'm pissed / hungover. Need chips / pie / fry up". Sadly, my Edinburgh story is entirely written and directed by the Fringe Festival.

It's 16 years since I first came to the Festival and probably my 10th or 11th visit in that time. From wide-eyed ingenue in car crash clunky student 'drama' to director (of car crash clunky student 'drama'), venue manager, producer, scout and punter, I must have seen several hundred shows over that time, including a couple of years when I saw next to none other than the ones I worked on. I've seen the inside and the outside of innumerable pubs, clubs, tents and bars and disrupted a romantic dawn marriage proposal by climbing Arthur's Seat at 4.30 in the morning with a group of fellow performers after the terrible club we were in closed. I've eaten with taxi drivers, postmen and transvestites, but yet not anywhere with a tablecloth and plates not made out of paper or polystyrene.
  

Lunch is habitually either ignored, liquid or grabbed from Pie Master, a uniquely and wonderfully doughy temple to the pastry slice just off the Royal Mile serving warmed individual pies, and nothing else. With over 25 different flavours of filling from chicken tikka and lamb stew to apple and custard (and yes, haggis too) you could literally eat here for every meal. And reader, some years I have… Standing on Tron Square in the drear, that unique Scottish weather system that feels like being in a cloud, chowing on a scalding haggis pastie is one of the rights of passage. No one looks great in a pac-a-mac, but you'll be dry and that's more important.

Anything made out of stomach, offcuts and oat is going to be challenging at first, but don't think that eating haggis is just for brave tourists and the terminally homesick. Head to Dirty Dicks on Rose Street for the real(ish) deal. That being said, eating haggis on the Royal Mile, while wearing a tartan Glengarry hat, listening to the squirl of a schemie from Portobello abusing a bagpipe, is for tourists. Avoid please.

Breakfast takes care of itself by occurring in the time you are finally, fitfully fast asleep. In the years that I needed to be up that early, generally to bother tourists on the Royal Mile by flyering at them with extreme prejudice, a matchstick thin roll up and a coffee would suffice.
  

The problems arise at what you usually know as tea time. The 5.30 till 8.30 slot is usually filled to the gills with any number of unmissable bits of theatre or early comedy. It's both a lucrative and likely award winning slot, if only because you can guarantee that most critics and audiences will have finally woken up by then…

So by the time that's out of the way, you've had a couple more pints, caught up with your New Fest Friends and been dragged into a ropey cabaret show featuring Loopy Lisa and her Luscious Lollipops. Another couple of pints to deconstruct the horrors you've just witnessed and it's close to 11. Into one of the jerry built performers bars with Loopy Lisa and her Lollipops (out of the show, all cleaned up and delightful darling) you go. Before you know it, it's 3.30am and you're watching some tool with a sparkly hat trying to play the piano in the corner of an upstairs lock in while a midget with a poncho tries to seduce your friends.

You've got to love the Festival Bubble though. It allows you to binge drink nightly and smoke heavily for 2 or 3 weeks in a row, eating nothing but fried, sleeping in a room that doubles for a scene in Trainspotting. You'll feel fine until you leave and then it all catches up with you. You have to love the locals too, and contrary to popular belief, the locals love the Festival. Like most people, they adore having their daily lives disrupted and their pubs and restaurants crammed by a bunch of strangers who own it for a month of the year. Mainly because they take such delight in helpfully directing you to the random pop up theatre you desperately need to get to. Just stop one and ask!