Stuart Ralston’s Edinburgh restaurants Aizle and Noto are among the Scottish capital’s most highly regarded. Ralston clearly understands the mechanics of good restaurants very well, and at Tipo he’s applied a similar formula to a new theme; the bright, airy dining room, sharing plate and cocktail format leans right into the restaurant zeitgeist. The menu is packed with modern twists on broad Italian and Mediterranean flavours with crispy lamb fritte, sourdough focaccia, comforting pasta dishes and soft serve ice cream.
Climb the stairs of this old Edinburgh townhouse and you find your way to a first floor dining room, with high ceilings and a row of street-facing windows. Drinks all come out from a bar at the far end of the room, and… that’s it really. It’s cosy, compact - a very pleasant place to spend an afternoon or evening. A black pepper negroni cocktail slips down rather too easily at our window table, as we watch locals stroll up and down the street, untroubled by a sudden downpour.
The food is similarly attractive, though it often feels a little style over substance. A plate of cured mackerel, chilli and fermented grape is very easy on the eye but the flavours are rather muted, and the addition of batter scraps feels incongruous and unecessary. Octopus carpaccio is a similar story - beautifully assembled but less well executed.
Where Tipo really excels is pasta - gorgeous, saucy bowls of strozzapreti with sausage ragu, and cacio e pepe with chewy rounds of bigoli running through it.
We finish with a lemon tart, which turns out to be more of a lemon meringue pie. Both the lemon filling and the meringue are sweet, and the generous slice is rather overwhelming as a result. We applaud the ambition but Tipo feels like a restaurant that is trying to do a little too much; the simplest things on the menu are the best, and if you come and tuck into all the pasta, we reckon you'll leave extremely happy.