A Spoonful of everything, please

Concerning restaurants the designation ‘honest’ is not only erroneous, but prosaically commonplace. An eatery cannot lie or deceive; a pub cannot masquerade as an organic delicatessen. Honesty is an altogether human trait, and yet the tendency is to construe restaurants as anthropomorphic. The treatment of Spoon would be no different were I to say it is “honest” and not simply reflective of its owners' charisma: however—and here I risk hypocrisy—Richard and Moira Alexander legitimately imbue it with humanity, timelessness and, above all, charm. Quirk is not original in Edinburgh, but here it is elevated to a new calibre. The Alexanders bespeckle the restaurant with idiosyncratic touches: ‘70s lampshades, Edwardian screens, chairs adorned with comic strips. All eras meld together here to create an abiding sense of perennial continuity. The visual rhetoric of tea-lights in tea-cups is not naff, but charming.

The food, however, evinces none of this delightful floridness. It is just classically good. Unable to resist a poached egg—creamy-white with sun-like yolk— I was unutterably thankful that my French black pudding salad (£4.95) embraced a perfect specimen. When pierced the coral-coloured emollient made for the most velvety of dressings and proved a perfect companion for the sweet, dark, blood-rich pudding when spread in flavoursome farrago on warm sourdough bread.

Char-grilled tuna steak, pickled cucumber and borlotti beans (£14.95) constituted Neptune's nursery food: the flesh was meltingly soft and freshly evocative of the sea; deliciously charred with a blackened salty criss-cross, it sat on a bed of firm, meaty, Tuscan-coloured beans. The almost-tasteless cucumber chunks, though, were perhaps a little too avant-garde to be worthwhile.

Dessert began with a promising premise. Prune pudding with caramel sauce (£4.50) suggests luscious school-dinner comfort, but I found myself underwhelmed. The sweet deliquescent prunes were not sufficient to mollify the slightly dry sponge, and there wasn't enough sauce. Perhaps I'm being overly condemning: a steamed pudding is not a soufflé; it must be robust; British in its rib-sticking, comfort-laden, stomach-filling authority, and this it certainly was. 

Spoon can't help but feel homely. The restaurant is filled with everything Moira loves; her character touches everything about it, and it makes you feel welcome, while Richard's food, in its classic comforting simplicity, only reinforces the feeling.