Gareth Edwards: Are we hungry for a return to hearty and unfussy fare?

IT is a city famed for its eateries where you can tuck into everything from zebra to jellyfish salad, eat your way around the world or, if your pockets are deep enough, sample the best Michelin-starred chefs have to offer.

Edinburgh's top restaurants pride themselves on being at the cutting edge of culinary creation as they outdo each other with ever more elaborate and expensive dishes. But has this happened at the expense of good, old-fashioned nosh?

Queen of the kitchen and grand dame of celebrity chefs Delia Smith certainly thinks so. She has taken up the fight to bring back the simple cuisine of the 1970s, dismissing what she describes as the "pretentious and fussy" foods being championed by a new wave of celebrity chefs.

Speaking this week Miss Smith, 70, said: "I like the 70s the best, really. Gifted amateurs opened restaurants and pubs and you could have real food.

"If I am in a Michelin-starred restaurant and they have done this beautiful little smoked haddock souffle in a thimble, I would like to order a whole big plateful. No, I'm not for four-course tasting menus."

It isn't the first time Delia has hit out at modern chefs, previously accusing them of "ridiculing" the public with fussy recipes and arrogance.

So is food today really too posh to nosh, or has Delia, after a lifetime of fine dining, just become a little jaded with modern cuisine?

The Capital today caters for every taste imaginable. As well as hosting fried chicken shacks and greasy spoons, the city is home to some of the country's finest restaurants, serving up dishes which taste divine and read like a verse of obscure Russian poetry.

One of the most recent additions to Edinburgh's fine dining scene is Paul Kitching's Restaurant 2-1-2-1-2, which provoked as much discussion about its name as it did over the food.

Opened in 2009, it already has a Michelin star and is a must for any serious local foodies. The dishes are complex, the ingredients varied - saffron-scented beads of fregola and Merguex sausage anyone? - and the food has been described, in a positive sense, as "an assault on the taste buds".

Mr Kitching himself found Delia's argument fascinating but said people's changing tastes and the increase in the number of restaurants meant her arguments were not as simple as the food she was championing.

"It's an interesting argument, but then how far back do we go?" he said. "Why stop at the 70s - we could go back to the time of Henry VIII and the banquets of wild boar, or back to the Stone Age when we ate nothing but woolly mammoths.

"Restaurants in the 70s were not operating in the same environment as they do now, and far fewer people went out to eat. The style of the modern top restaurants was all started in the 1970s with nouvelle cuisine, which was all about less butter, less fat, less cream and smaller, healthier portions, which is all we hear about these days.

"Modern restaurants don't serve tiny little portions of lamb to make money but because it is considered as part of the overall menu. There will always be a place for different styles of cooking, and if you're cooking at home there's nothing better than big portion of beans on toast, but that's not what you go to a restaurant for."

Of course, a lesson in obscure herbs and spices isn't what everyone goes to a restaurant for either, and there's no denying that it's not just Delia who enjoys some good, simple grub.

Terry Soe, the owner and chef at Mum's on Forrest Road, started up his business with Monster Mash in 2003, and at the time he admits the idea was to provide the kind of hearty portions of good, simple food that a lot of restaurants seemed to be overlooking.

"Good, simple food was certainly the idea back in 2003, and I think there was real niche in the market then, as restaurants were all wanting to include something Mediterranean or have a drizzle with their food, that sort of stuff, and there was a bit of a backlash," he said.

"Now there are a lot more places like our own focusing on this kind of food, which shows there is a good market for it.

"We use good ingredients and everything is freshly made, so the quality is good, but the dishes are simple, and that's what a lot of people want."

While being a fan of 70s food, however, Mr Soe believes the more exotic restaurants also have a place.

"There's room for everything really, and sometimes people want to experience very different tastes," he said.

"I think there is an element of dissatisfaction creeping in around some of these places, where the food is maybe a bit fussy and a lot of people think they are not really getting value for money."

In this age of austerity that is certainly something to mull over the next time you think about eating out.