Restaurant review: The Bon Vivant 55 Thistle Street, Edinburgh

When Davie likes somewhere, he lets you know and for months now he’s been banging on about The Bon Vivant. After holding out for what seemed like years, eventually I succumbed to a nagging sense of curiosity about the place.

Ten minutes after sitting down to eat there on a Friday night, however, all curiosity had dissipated. It was replaced with a feeling of being mildly ancient. Bea says she was ignored by all three waiters when she turned up alone as I parked the car, adding rather dramatically that she had “become invisible in that way that little old ladies are”.

She painted the sort of scene reminiscent of New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl’s fantastic memoirs Garlic And Sapphires, where she wrote about her experiences of turning up at the finest restaurants dressed as a bag lady with a dab of her home-made perfume Eau de Urine under each armpit.

I don’t think either of us smelled of pee, but we certainly didn’t fit in. In our mid-forties, we were roughly 20 years older than virtually everyone else, and while we were headed back home to a nightcap and, if things got really racy, half an hour of Newsnight, the mob of beautiful young things in Bon Vivant were clearly nightclub-bound.

The only other middle-aged bloke in the place couldn’t wait to hit the clubs, and we had the misfortune to be on the next table to him. The music was already sufficiently oppressive that shouting at each other was the order of the day (ear trumpet, Mildred?), but our efforts to communicate weren’t helped by the drunken and unfeasibly loud singing of the fellow auld yin on the table next to us.

“If I was you I’d be really fed up by now – is he bothering you?” asked our waitress, pointing in the direction of the offending Prada-clad crooner. “No, no, of course not,” I lied.

It wasn’t, it’s fair to say, a good start to any meal, notwithstanding our decision to go out lateish on a Friday night. Nor was the place immediately inviting, with bouncers outside and a thronged bar (more like a pub actually) to navigate before getting to the dining area at the back of the building. With its low ceilings and oppressive black walls, it was like a cloying cocoon. An old colleague of mine’s favourite cliché was to hold forth about the “Stygian depths” and I always wondered what on earth he meant; now I know.

Finally seated in the codgers’ corner, having ordered a couple of perilously strong cocktails, we finally got around to some serious appraisal of this recommendation by Sao Paolo’s finest. It wasn’t looking good: Bea would have given the waiters less points than the Bulgarian Eurovision entrants (I thought our waitress was attentive and friendly), and the choice of canned music wasn’t half-bad, but after that it was thumbs down all the way.

Then a funny thing happened (actually, it wasn’t that funny, just better than listening to the tipsy songmeister on the next table): the food started arriving. First appearances count, and I had expected the grub to be dismal, but it wasn’t. In fact, it headed past competence and was off in search of excellence.

We started off with what were called ‘bites’ and were surprised to find they were really very good indeed. They were basically canapés costing £1 each, but then I like small tasters, and this lot – lemon-grilled herring with chilli tomato salsa, a leek and ginger fritter with curried mayo, chicken satay with peanut sauce, and salt ’n’ pepper squid – were a fantastically pleasant surprise.

That was enough for my fug of irritation to lift, and from then on we were treated to a bravura performance. My rustic starter of chorizo in cider was straight out of Stephane Reynaud’s inestimable cookbook Pork And Sons, while Bea’s helping of Serrano ham was unexpectedly hefty and of even more surprisingly high quality. Nor was that a flash in the pan, so to speak: my main course of pan-fried seabass with mussels in a broth was perfectly-judged bistro fodder, while Bea’s crottin Wellington with truffled wild mushrooms and asparagus had her purring.

To round off a comeback that ranks alongside Jo-Wilfried Tsonga’s five-set defeat of Roger Federer at Wimbledon, the £1 ‘after bites’ (pudding canapés) were as competent as those that had preceded our starters. We could have lived without the stodgy sticky toffee pudding, but the home-made ice-cream, delicate pineapple carpaccio and palate-cleansing ginger sorbet, plus the raspberry and custard tart were all of joyously good quality.

When the time came to leave (which was as soon as we’d finished the last mouthful), we were still undecided as to the quality of the place. Bea muttered darkly about pearls before swine, but I’m inclined to think this was very decent – and pleasingly affordable – easy-dining fare.

Either way, I’m going to enjoy finding out, although I suspect my next outing to the Bon Vivant will be on a quiet Tuesday lunchtime when the turntable is packed away and the good folk we encountered last week are safely tucked up in Magaluf and Ibiza.

And this time I’m taking Brazilian Davie.

Bill please

Starters £4-£6.50 Main courses £9.50-£12 Puddings £3-£4 (or canapés £1 each; cheeseboard £6)