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Times Review

June 12th, 2009

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For my wedding last year I needed to buy a plain, classic white shirt and just happened to pass Turnbull & Asser in Mayfair, a sort of Slaters for people who own principalities. Their cheapest white shirt was £120. I swallowed hard. Was it, I wondered, in some way a magic shirt? Apparently not.

I bought it anyway. I fully expected that as I made way to the till the staff would cheer and applaud manfully, perhaps while dabbing small tears of gratitude from the corners of their eyes.

This didn’t happen. Instead the assistant took me aside and said with a tiny cough: “Sir, we also have shirts with a touch . . . more quality.” I have to say this confused me. Why had this quality escaped the shirt for which I was paying such an exorbitant sum? A pricier shirt seemed not only inadvisable, it seemed inexplicable.

But such are the mysteries of the Bufton Tufton world of gentleman’s finery and upscale requisite purveyance. Edinburgh loves all this sort of stuff, of course — all the racing-green, fob-watched, hunting-print lordliness it can stuff into its waistcoat.

If Edinburgh could invent an eight-piece suit it would. It has a soul made from badger bristles and monogrammed tweed brogue-buffers.

Hence Hawke and Hunter. As far as I can ascertain, there is neither a Mr Hawke nor a Mr Hunter on the premises. The proprietor is one Simon Taylor, a young chap awfully capable at this rugby football malarkey. He could have called the place Taylor’s but it might have been taken for, well, a tailor’s. So Hawke and Hunter it is, with all its noble Wodehousian overtones of gorse-yomping and birds of prey, wellingtons and woodcock.

The curious thing is that the dining room is all straight Habitat-catalogue, young-executive stridency, with random acts of scarlet and gargantuan lampshades.

As well as being the birthplace of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, this space was formerly the Hallion and Home House, two doomed private members’ clubs — doomed because people join modern private members’ clubs to rub shoulders with celebrities and don’t renew their memberships when the Hibernian manager is the best they get. So it has been reincarnated as a general-entry bar/restaurant/hotel complex with a sort of gothic, trendy-crucifix design theme that rather has you wondering why they didn’t name the place Vlad and Van Helsing or similar.

The food is militantly nu-Scottish: carnivorous but with plenty of provenance and leavened with some lemony, herby squeezes of Mediterranean finesse. The lunchtime menu — or “Food and Drink Collection” — represents remarkable value. Some very acceptable crescents of haggis in oaty shards were £3.

The main, an uncompromising rectangle of of pork belly, was a fiver. It came on a chopping board with a tiny dish of apple reduction with a side order of creamed sweetcorn and barley arriving in a Kilner jar.

The jar reappeared later containing a dessert of rhubarb salad; pylons of jelly and real rhubarb on a base of crumble. It cost more than a fiver; clearly the drinks and desserts subsidise the imaginative and uncommon dishes further up the menu — sorry, the Food and Drink Collection.

It was difficult to take umbrage, though; this was thoughtful, well-executed food, slightly gimmicky, perhaps, but ready to take risks and grounded solidly in the culinary classics of loch and tarn. Pop in here and you will not lose your shirt.

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