Ottolenghi Edinburgh is the group’s first restaurant in Scotland, an all-day dining room in the city’s New Town serving breakfast through to dinner. The menu is the work of Executive Head Chef Neil Campbell, who grew up on the Isle of Skye and cooked in Scottish kitchens before a decade at Ottolenghi, so the brand’s veg-forward sharing plates come shot through with Scottish produce.
Lunch and dinner open with a spread for the table: a changing line-up of dips, pickles and ferments, with flatbread and black garlic butter hot from the oven. Slow-cooked dishes follow in handcrafted claypots from Casalatina, a format you won’t find at any other Ottolenghi - lamb and aubergine rice pie with chopped dill pickle, caramelised onion lasagne, or braised cod with flamingo peas and ‘nduja butter.
Scottish seafood runs through the menu, from East Coast langoustines grilled with fermented chilli butter to a mixed shellfish Jerusalem grill. Much of the fish comes from Welch Fishmonger, whom Campbell first got to know as a young chef at Ondine. Vegetables are from The Free Company’s no-dig market garden and Phantassie Organics, while Knockraich crowdie from Katy Rodger stars in the baked cheesecake.
Breakfast mixes Ottolenghi classics - shakshuka, banana bread with tahini and honeycomb - with Scottish dishes such as well-fired morning rolls with scrambled harissa tofu or schmaltz butter, and a full Scottish breakfast with urfa beans and tattie scones.
Natural wines and a long whisky list, including an Ottolenghi x Woven Whisky Makers blend from Leith, sit alongside three house martinis, ordered singly or as a flight of minis with house-made pickles. Cairn & Crest combines gin, dry vermouth, Chartreuse and spruce; Tide & Isle mixes Ammos vodka with Vault coastal vermouth, Hebridean sea salt and rock samphire; and Marsh & Heather pairs No.3 London Dry Gin with Vault meadowsweet vermouth, wood sorrel and peat.