The West End does a brisk trade as it is. Tram stops and office lunches, the run out to the airport, and those Scotland match days when Murrayfield empties and this corner of the city feels the benefit first.
Understory, open on Rutland Street since the middle of last month is a far more persuasive reason to stick around after dark. It takes its name from the layer of a forest that grows beneath the canopy, out of the light, where things quietly get on with it – which is exactly what is happening under the pavement at 1a Rutland Street.
Down a flight of stairs, in vaults beneath the Edwardian Rutland building, the room is all deep red panelling and maximalist flourish, with a ceiling gone gloriously feral with painted foliage. Lamps sit low on the tables, whisky barrels double as perches, and the bar back glows copper under a halo of glassware.
What is a dive bar?
Dive bars, traditionally, run on cheap measures, a jukebox and a neon sign or two. Understory keeps the unpretentious, sit-where-you-like ease of one and swaps everything else for drinks of genuine sophistication, made by a team who can tell you exactly why each element is in the glass. So don’t be misled by the sight of a tankard arriving with a bag of Scampi Fries at half past midnight. That is a show-stopping cocktail bottled and poured to look like a pint (more on that drink shortly!)
Understory is in experienced hands. General manager Sam Baxendale has been prised away from Bramble – the World Top 50 bar – where he spent five years at the helm, and he arrives with more than two decades of Edinburgh service behind him, Monteiths and Bon Vivant included. The drinks come from James Grant, head of bars for the Rutland building at 27 years young, a finalist in a string of national cocktail competitions and the man responsible for a cocktail list built entirely around nostalgia. The debut chapter, Batch 01: Halcyon Days, draws on British childhood memories without being gimmicky. Think corner-shop sweetie jars and the warm fuzz of a half-remembered summer, all pulled apart and rebuilt. Nothing here is played for a cheap laugh. Every detail has its place, and there is no unnecessary dry ice or smoke bubble just because.
Take the Marmalade Sandwich, a drink that began life as the simplest thing on the menu and ended up the most complicated. Five kilos of croissants are toasted to the edge of burnt, blitzed, then broken down with enzymes until the starch turns sweet and soluble. The solids become a marmalade foam, the liquid a croissant syrup. What arrives is a delicate thin-lipped tumbler of hazy amber under a thick, pale cap of foam, sitting as smugly as the head on a pint. The first sip is butter and toast, the second, sweet oranges and the gentle boozy hum of Diplomático, Nixta and Angostura underneath. It is a breakfast martini that has grown up, moved out and got an interesting job. They sold more than 500 in the first two nights.
Trip to the Pub is the other aforementioned showstopper and it’s the menu’s finest piece of juxtaposition. It arrives in its own bottle, labelled with a big red P where a certain Scottish lager would have its T, and you pour it yourself into a tankard with a base thick enough to double as a paperweight, loaded with one long, elegant spear of ice, with Scampi Fries alongside. Everything about the serve says half of lager and a packet of crisps.
But in the glass: rum and white chocolate, mellowed with earthy oolong, and a frankly absurd amount of banana – not the foam banana sweet of every childhood pick ‘n’ mix, but the real fruit. Did you know you can juice a banana? Neither did we. The fruit is pulped with pectinase, an enzyme that unpicks the pectin holding it together, then spun in the centrifuge until what is left runs completely clear and tastes overwhelmingly of fresh banana. It should not work alongside a bag of Scampi Fries, undisputed champion of the pub snack shelf. And yet it does. Truly, this sh*t is bananas – in the best possible way.
The rest you should go and sample for yourself – perhaps a Cheeky Vimto or a Guinness-tini. Though if I’m allowed one more recommendation, the Lychee Martini is washed with Petits Filous, of all things, for a soft, yoghurty roundness that pulls the 90s straight out of the glass. One sip and you are back in the good old days, peeling the lid off a yoghurt pot at the kitchen table. The kitchen sends down small plates from Kyloe’s chef upstairs: beef tartare and caviar scooped onto salted crisps, barbecue corn ribs, and juicy golden-crumbed chicken tenders, served with a glass of Champagne because why on earth not.
Upstairs in The Huxley, sketchbook open on the table, it becomes obvious where all this comes from. James did a fine art degree before hospitality claimed him for good, and drawing has stayed the engine of the whole operation. Every drink on the list starts life as a pencil sketch: the glass, the garnish, the colour, the joke, worked out on paper long before anything is weighed or spun. “Everything starts as a sketch. It’s how I get my ideas down,” he says. “It’s important to have a goal, otherwise you get sidetracked into what you can do and how you can do it, not necessarily why you’re doing it.” Those same drawings end up under your glass, printed as the bar’s coasters, so the thing you are drinking and the thing that first imagined it arrive together. It is a lovely touch, and a quietly confident one – most bars would rather you never saw the working.
Despite sitting within Signature Group, boasting a portfolio of more than twenty venues across Scotland, Understory wears the association lightly. The intention was to keep the freedom of an independent bar and pair it with the muscle of a group behind it, and on the evidence downstairs the balance has landed. The room, the list and the lab all feel like they belong to the people making them rather than to a template handed down from head office.
It is a bold moment to open a bar in this city, and there is no sugarcoating that either. Fantastic independents are closing (Lucky Liquor being the most recent fallen soldier), margins are thinner than ever, and every one of these drinks carries hours of technique – enzymes, ferments, centrifuges, force carbonation, fat washing – before it reaches the pass. Understory has chosen not to make that the customer’s problem. “You could definitely charge far more,” says James, “but I want people to enjoy themselves. I don’t want cocktail culture to die because we out-price everything.”
Nightcap and Uno Mas have long kept the small hours in safe hands on the other side of town, and the West End has been crying out for its own answer. Now it has one, serving until 1am through the week and 3am on Fridays and Saturdays, which means the natural progression of an evening no longer has to end in a tacky basement club with a sticky floor and chart music at a volume that kills the conversation. Here we have “just one more drink” that’s still a proper drink.
Understory has my seal of approval, big time. Expect to find me down there long past my bedtime, perhaps even on a Tuesday night, teaspooning tonka bean sorbet out of a bougie Irn-Bru float with no intention of leaving. That’s another drink you must try.
Understory, 1a Rutland Street, EH1 2AE. Open seven days, 4pm until 1am Sunday to Thursday, and until 3am on Fridays and Saturdays.
