One Square, The Sheraton Grand Hotel & Spa’s award-winning brasserie, is serving up their new seasonal Market Menu curated by Executive Chef Shaun Woodhouse and his team from Monday to Saturday, from 12.30pm to 9.00pm.
After a busy afternoon sight-seeing with an Australian visitor, we were ready for an early dinner at 5.30pm and although we were the only diners at the ‘witching-hour’ as my friend described it, the restaurant soon filled up.
Overlooking Festival Square, it’s a great place for some people watching. The restaurant’s ambience was warm and inviting, matched by the perfect hostess, warm and friendly South-African Tessa, although her accent is hard to detect, having been brought up in Edinburgh since she was 5-years-old.
The menu offers some of the same dishes as on their à la carte menu, and although there’s only three choices each for starters, mains and desserts, the dishes are tempting.
First courses include Salt baked celeriac, oyster mushroom and truffle soup, mustard-pickled seabass with cucumber, watercress and fennel salad and seaweed cream (a cold seabass salad, slightly dry but with a beautiful dressing), chicken and herb boudin (a meat-type sausage) with beetroot, confit garlic, puy lentils and cured bacon. While not a fan of the boudin, which had the texture of a well-cooked omelette, the accompanying warm puy lentil salad was earthy and flavoursome, which I happily devoured, scraping every last morsel.
The main course of risotto of spinach, goat’s cheese balls, while delicious was creamy and very rich and perhaps a smaller portion, served as a starter would not have been so overwhelming. Meanwhile, my pork belly with a sweet glaze served with two wedges of turnip as potato substitutes and a pearl barley was a good marriage of flavours and textures.
My dining partner made the perfect dessert choice, the Key Lime pie, which was the perfect palate cleanser, after her rich risotto. Meanwhile Tessa, our waitress, had subtly tried to warn me that my dessert choice was a sundae of chocolate brownie with banana, salted caramel sauce and peanut butter ice-cream. It was challenging to deconstruct the different elements with grace, and the banana component was overwhelming.
If you’re looking for somewhere to eat before a show at the Lyceum, the Usher Hall, or the Traverse, One Square, just a hop, skip and a jump away, could be the perfect place. At £23 for two courses or three for only £29, it’s competitively priced, matched with welcoming service.
https://www.onesquareedinburgh.co.uk/
