The Dining Room

28 Queen Street, Edinburgh

0131 220 2044

Lunch/Dinner: £21.95-£75

Food rating: 6/10

THE Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) has refurbished its Queen Street premises in Edinburgh putting the restaurant on the first floor. A new Kaleidoscope whisky bar replaces it at ground level. Members must climb the curving Georgian stairs to the second floor for their privacy.

Is it just me, or does a fresh breeze of commercialism now course through the establishment? The nuances of cask strength malts used to be for whisky buffs. Now SMWS seems to be reaching out to a broader clientele. It has launched a psychometric “flavour behaviour test” that matches your personality type to your flavour preferences. So that’ll be an inoffensive Lowland malt for Clare Balding and a carbolic Islay for George Galloway. It sounds to me like a woman’s mag gimmick, the affluent lad-around-town equivalent of a hen night activity.

We’re put in the smaller, secondary dining room, in audible range of a family taking wise advantage of the £21.95 pre-theatre menu. The room is graciously Georgian, but our circular table is too small, already cluttered, and wobbles and rotates if you touch it. We leaf quickly past the £75 taster menu to the three-course à la carte menu at £42. Every side order adds £3.95. At this price I need to be wowed, but ultimately, I am not.

A loud sommelier sporting a pigtail beard that surely references Salvador Dali’s moustache leads a whole rigmarole around wine. Am I imagining a tacit expectation that we’ll play audience to the spiel, and defer to his recommendation? Our waitresses are pleasant and willing, but lack both assurance and anything other than superficial knowledge of the composition of the dishes.

Nibbles – a goat’s cheese and chive pastry and a chorizo and potato croquette – are both fried. How very Scottish. Two fat quenelles of flavoured butter, one with parmesan and black pepper, the other with confit lemon and thyme, add to the table-top log jam. Neither is an improvement on plain, good quality butter. Still, the sourdough bread is good. A micro-course of smoked haddock tartare is light on the fish but heavy on diced potato and a jarringly sweet biscuity crumble, so the accompanying snifter of 59° proof, nine-year-old Aberlour malt effortlessly steals the show.

Starters raise expectations. There’s baked halibut stylishly set on parallel black, carrot red, and translucent green lines of what I take to be olive tapenade, tomato coulis, and basil oil. Braised endive adds interest, although I could live without the smoked paprika crumble, rather similar to the one we already ate. Succulent rabbit ballotine, topped by a sweet, crunchy garnish of yellow mustard seeds, flanked by caramelised cauliflower florets and wafer-crisp pancetta, is impeccably done.

As the dining rooms fill up, service slows, and when our tepid main courses arrive, they betray signs of haste in the kitchen. Neither of the main events – duck and lamb – is assuredly cooked. The duck fat on the breast hasn’t been rendered and strata of colour within the slack flesh range from a raw red to beige-brown, a sign of uneven cooking and/or haphazard resting. The bird’s confit is cremated. The sauce doesn’t deliver the magic of the words on the menu that hooked me: liquorice, pickled plum. Rolled saddle of lamb looks neat, but parts of the skin under their sizzled surface are chewy, with more uneven colour as the coil unrolls. A clove of confit garlic, made using an aggressively stale, rank bulb, is the kiss of death.

Multi-element desserts look fussily pretty on the plate yet not one really thrills. A transparent disc of hard, blonde sugar actively detracts from a reasonable gooseberry sponge and parfait. Dark chocolate pave is as sticky and cloying as caramel. Its clean, refreshing scoop of cherry sorbet and blobs of cherry jelly help, but its ultra-sweet chocolate brandy snap-style wafer doesn’t.

All in all, this isn’t how I want to spend £110, with service, two glasses of wine, and no nightcap malt. I spot two tables of all-male groups in their 40s and 50s, possibly business customers paying with the company card? Maybe they’re lapping up the slick, new-look SMWS. Me? I preferred the scruffier old one.