Edinburgh for foodies

Best restaurants

Edinburgh eats along a tight axis. The New Town grid between St Andrew Square and George Street, and the Old Town spine down North Bridge, hold most of the rooms a visitor should bother with, and the walk from one end of this list to the other takes about twenty minutes. What follows is twelve restaurants that reward the trip: a sushi counter with real fish, three arguments about what an Indian menu can be, a pizza room that lets the dough do the talking, a French bar-bistro that keeps late hours, a beef counter, a vegetarian kitchen that treats vegetables as the plot, and an Italian family room on Elm Row that has fed the neighbourhood for years. Skip the tartan-wrapped ceilidh-and-haggis rooms on the Royal Mile; the locals eat in the streets on either side of it. Every address, every phone, every posted service hour below is cited to a mapped source, so you can walk in the door confident the door is where we say it is.