Restaurant review: Urban Angel Cafe, Edinburgh

If there were a comic book superhero called Urban Angel, they would have their work cut out.

Distracting traffic wardens, resuscitating locked bicycles that have slumped against lampposts, retrieving posties’ pink rubber bands and inserting railings into lost gloves.

Not particularly glamorous or exciting jobs, granted, but important ones in the city centre.

In a way, the Urban Angel cafe, with two branches in Edinburgh as well as a newer deli at 47 Broughton Street, is a bit of a superhero.

That is, in the sense of providing oases of local, organic, free-range and fairly traded food.

In fact, this ethos gave me the perfect excuse to visit its four-year-old branch on Forth Street, since we’re in the middle of Fairtrade Fortnight (until 11 March).

We bagged a window seat – a grey banquette topped by colourful Marimekko cushions, in this white, high-ceilinged space, with its kaleidoscopic stencils on the wall.

If you fancy, you can choose three of their snacky Little Plates (individually, all around the £4.50 mark) for a tenner.

We did, so ordered the lamb meatballs, mackerel escabeche and baba ganoush polenta crostini as a shared starter.

Ten minutes later, there was an airline-style “bing bong” sound from the basement kitchen, which prompted one of the two hostesses to rocket downstairs. Swiftly delivered, our mini-plates of grub were all satisfying, but my fave was the veggie option.

It featured a tile of griddled polenta, layered with a smoky baba ganoush duvet, then a coiled sheet of sweet and crispy aubergine, plus a thatch of springy rocket leaves on the roof. Lovely.

The clean-tasting fish offering consisted of two fat fillets of petrol-coloured poached mackerel, in a sweet, juniper-flavoured white wine vinegar, with pickled carrot slivers and sliced white onion on the side.

Our meatballs were perhaps the most forgettable of the trio, with six gobstopper-sized, dense balls of vaguely minty lamb in an intensely tomatoey and chilli-spiked sugo. Not bad.

For mains, we were drawn towards the specials blackboard, which was right behind my dining partner’s bonce.

From this, he fancied the smoked pheasant, courgette and lemon risotto (£11.90), despite the fact that they’d run out of the middle ingredient.

Not that zero zucchini mattered, as this option was a corker. The arborio rice was cooked beautifully, with a creaminess that was lifted by citrus, parsley and spring onion.

There was also plenty of delicately smoky game in this mixture. So our only gripe was that there was an awful lot of yellow fat on the meat – we could have done with a liposuction machine to syphon it off.

My second course – beetroot, pear and blue cheese souffle (£11.50) – was another daily special. This arrived in its little white ramekin – sadly, not billowing over the top, but flush to the rim. However, even if the texture was slightly skew-whiff, the flavour was good, with nibs of earthy beetroot and sweet pear, and a mellow tinge of cheesiness in the background.

This was teamed with a helping of purple sprouting broccoli, which was topped with a dissolving disc of tarragon butter and a sprinkling of toasty almonds.

When it comes to sidekicks, this dish was the foodie equivalent of Robin trumping Batman.

Puddings were limited, as Urban Angel is an all-day operation and their cake supply was running low at 7pm-ish.

From the brief shortlist, we went for pear frangipani cake and a baked vanilla cheesecake (£4.50 each).

The former was a glazed triangle of moist almond sponge, which encased chunks of damp pear. This option had been rendered even more dastardly by the addition of a pot of raspberry compote and a large scoop of sticky clotted cream. It was fab, as was the other dessert – a fluffy, densely packed, burnish topped cake, with a texture that plastered the cornices on the roof of one’s mouth.

I also have to mention the biochai (£2.40) which is available on the drinks menu. This tea was made from a loose masala chai mixture and accompanied by a shot glass of heathery honey and a jug of steamed milk.

It gave me extreme fortitude, which I needed – not to fight crime, but to finish the rest of my cake (we can rely on Urban Angel to look after the actual superhero stuff).