Richard Bath heads to one of the smartest dining rooms in Edinburgh at the Pompadour to try out the six course tasting menu offered by incumbent new chef Dean Banks.
Regular readers will have witnessed my increasing discomfort at the speed with which prices, especially at the pointy end of the Edinburgh market where the tasting menus roam free, have been rising. The pre-Covid days when you could pay for a meal for two and have change from £100 now seem like a lifetime ago, but over the past 12-18 months a whole bunch of menus have been launched that have upped the ante so markedly that, when you include paired wines and service, they set diners back by £200-300 *each* (my record was a meal for two was £650 and I don’t think I’ll ever recover).
So I was intrigued to arrive at the Pompadour, which remains one of the smartest dining rooms in Edinburgh, to find that the six course tasting menu offered by incumbent new chef Dean Banks to mark the 120th anniversary of the Caledonian Hotel is ‘just’ £65 (although there’s a £12 supplement for the canapes and a £25 supplement for the lobster). If, instead of having the paired wines at £60 per person, you have a bottle of wine at £39, you can have a meal out for £170 before service, which qualifies as an absolute fine dining bargain these days.
This is a reversal of circumstances for the Pompadour. For several decades this fine dining salon in the Caledonian Hotel looking out on the castle was the smartest and most expensive in Edinburgh (one octogenarian I took there ten years ago was pleased to finally cross the threshold as she never went there as a young woman ‘because it was so expensive that if you accepted a man’s invitation to dinner, you were accepting more than dinner’). And it’s not as if the place has changed: its stunning cornicing and gorgeous panelled tapestries are listed, so in terms of décor this stylish salon with its spectacular views has enjoyed limited scope to evolve over the years.
In recent years The Pompadour had a selection of in-house head chefs, and then the multi-Michelin star holding Galvin brothers tried for years to make it work before the ambitious Masterchef chef and entrepreneur Dean Banks (who now has four other restaurants, including Haar and Dune in St Andrews, and Dulse and Askr in Edinburgh) took on the baton. Banks is an entrepreneur and this celebratory tasting menu is clearly an attempt to put bums on seats. Judging by the night we were there, it clearly appears to be working.
But what of the food? We started with three canapes (a smoked haddock vol au vent, a large oyster with apple vinegar, and an excellent chicken liver parfait on brioche which was comfortably the pick of the bunch), before moving onto bread and ‘whipped beef fat’, which was (rather comically I felt) down on the menu as a standalone course. I’ve had some truly epic bread – and, for that matter, butter – recently, and while this was solid, it didn’t really set the pulses racing.
However, the first ‘real’ course, a gorgeously moist terrine of rabbit breast and leg, plus some chicken, really hit the spot. Despite my earlier chat about saving pennies, we’d also decided to go for the paired wines, and this came in the form of a larger than normal glass of 100% Gamay Morgon Cois du Py which not only complemented the dish beautifully but made us both sit up and smile. That, it turned out, was a theme as we had a succession of wonderfully enjoyable and well-chosen glasses of wine.
Our next dish, a prawn cocktail with a too-small smidgeon of lobster bisque with paprika, was fine, but shaded by the subsequent poached lemon sole with pickled grapes and a sauce of vermouth and caviar. Three beautifully moist and tender discs of chicken stuffed with chicken mousse rounded off our savoury courses, the meal drawing to a close with a nice peach melba and a gorgeously rich sacher torte a la pompadour, an unctuous, oozing ball of chocolate torte true to the legendary dish which began life in Metternich’s kitchen at the Imperial Court.
But if I’m honest, the real delight was the wines, which were as good as any paired wines I’ve had. The 2020 Ribolla Gialla from Gasper in Slovenia, the 2022 Domaine Sutereau, a 2021 Jurancon Doux from Domaine Laguilhon and, lastly but by no means least, the fizzy decadence of a 2022 Brachetto D’Acqui Contero from Piedmonte had the meal purring along.
Dean Banks at The Pompadour, The Caledonian Hotel, Princes Street, Edinburgh, EH1 2AB. 07401 760638.
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