Restaurant review: Wishart's Warehouse, 19 Shore Place, Leith, Edinburgh

Published on Sunday 5 September 2010 12:45

The main problem with moving house a week before your cooker has been fitted, indeed before your kitchen has been installed, is food. Or, more precisely, a lack of it.

It doesn't help when the packers have left the microwave behind, 100 miles to the west. At least we got to know all the local take-aways in intimate detail.

Finally, the night before the grand unveiling of the gas hob, I'd had enough. Eating out of paper and plastic boxes is rubbish, and it was time to sit down properly with a glass of wine and lights that work, not to mention seats that aren't upturned packing cases. So, what to do when you're used to grown-up eating but you have a trio of children in tow? The answer: ring three chefs-with-families in your area and find out where they take their brood.

The answers were varied and often unhelpful, but the one common thread was Tapa, an 18-month-old restaurant tucked off the main drag in Leith, just behind Martin Wishart's.

Occupying the whole ground floor of the cavernous Wishart's Warehouse, it would be very easy to drive by without even registering the place, but that, it turned out, would have been our loss.

If you're looking for easy eating for a family on a budget, this place beats the boots off the well-known pizza parlours which, for so many of us, have become our default setting for family dining. Fresh from a summer holiday in Spain, at least there would also be no shock of the new for our offspring.

Spanish food is easy to do badly, as the grease-laden fare elsewhere proves, but done well, as it also is at Cafe Andaluz, it is a fantastically sociable way to eat. By the time we arrived at Tapa, at 8pm on a Wednesday, the place was already half-full and there was a hubbub of chat and laughter. Sharing food makes for the most convivial of atmospheres, and Tapa – whose roots in Moorish Granada are apparent at every turn, from the bull-fighting posters to the Moorish tiles and lamps – was created for sociability.

Tapa is actually the creation of Rob Scobie, the restaurateur whose 30-year love affair with Spain gave us the 1990s staple of Tapas Tree off Broughton Street and Tapas Ole before he headed off for a stint in Australia and Spain. To judge from his new venture, he and wife Kate have picked up a good deal of experience and ideas on their travels because Tapa is the sort of place you can imagine going for a night with a dozen friends rather than the more utilitarian cafe-style establishments with which he made his name.

If the environment is better than Tapas Tree, so is the food. That much was apparent from the moment that dishes started arriving. We ordered ten dishes for the five of us, probably one or two too many, so at an average of about 4 a dish, this makes for pretty economical dining. And, with the menu constructed by Scobie and his Granadan chef Adrian, there was plenty of scope for the children to try new flavours.

The menu is broken down into three main areas: meat, fish and vegetarian dishes, so we chose three of each and added the grilled sardines off the specials board. By far the most popular with the children were the meat dishes, with the huge, succulent meatballs in a rich tomato sauce disappearing at an indecent rate of knots.

The battered chicken breasts with aioli ("posh chicken nuggets with a garlic sauce, but delicious," said Ailsa) followed swiftly thereafter, with some sceptical looks at the chick pea, chorizo and black pudding stew leading to two refuseniks and one enthusiast. This, Bea and I quickly decided, was no bad thing because it left the lion's share of this intriguing dish for the two of us.

As well as three smallish sardines cooked on a griddle, our fishy dishes consisted of a small cairn of huge battered prawns, with a lime mayonnaise dip. If the prawns were good, I was less sure about the dip, which left a slightly sickly aftertaste. With that small proviso, the fish was all good. The battered calamares were softish, the whitebait perfectly done and piping hot.

The star among the vegetarian dishes was, without a doubt, a fantastic rendition of the tortilla Espanola, the traditional Spanish potato and onion omelette. That was followed closely by pan-fried mushrooms soaked in olive oil (happily, the children refused to touch these) while the patatas ali-oli, effectively small roast potatoes smothered with garlicky mayo, proved a hit with the young 'uns.

We rounded off with a totally unnecessary but hugely enjoyable cinnamon-infused cold rice pudding, plus a box of four hand-made petit fours truffles, which were almost (but not quite) worth the price tag of 5.50.

That, however, was a rare quibble. With genuinely friendly and efficient service, a hugely convivial environment and bite-sized food served at sensible prices, this is the sort of place where family eating won't break the bank and will bring a smile to the whole family's faces.

And, with another branch opening in Hanover Street a fortnight ago, it seems we're not the only ones who were impressed.

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on Sunday, 5 September, 2010