‘I could eat everything on this café’s day menu — then return for dinner’

Margot is the hippest new café in Edinburgh. So hip that “café” doesn’t cut the mustard. It is all the now things; a neighbourhood wine café serving small plates, minimal intervention wines, coffee, kombuchas, seasonal juices and sodas, and so on. Think house granola and Turkish eggs for brunch, pearl barley risotto on the day menu, Cumbrae oysters and a glass of skin-contact garnacha blanca in the evening, with thick cut diamond-shaped croissants winking in the window until they sell out, and an array of handsome dogs posing with their handsome owners on the slender bench outside. As recently as five years ago there were virtually no cafés like this in the land. Now the affluent bubbles in our cities glimmer with them. Many are a rip-off. Some are fabulous.
Margot, which is very much the latter, is, naturally, in Bruntsfield, looking on to the putting green section of the links. A few doors along is its big sister, Leftfield, one of Edinburgh’s best neighbourhood seafood restaurants, which last year made it into the Michelin Guide.
Over in my hip neighbourhood, Leith, a similar power coupling has arrived with Ardfern — an all-day café, bar and bottle shop — opening next door to its big sister, Roberta Hall McCarron’s legendary Little Chartroom. These are wee, laid-back, minimalist, supremely cool spots, basking in the sun of the Michelin-grade restaurants that bore them, where you get to eat beautiful, considered, seasonal, not-too-serious food conceived by some of Scotland’s best chefs for prices that are expensive for a café but not bad at all for relaxed fine dining.
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On a Sunday lunchtime in August, Margot is heaving. There’s even another restaurant critic in the queue. Until the Festival descended on the capital it was walk-in only, which meant I couldn’t easily review. Why? Because I’m a strung-out middle-aged woman with young children, eternally on the clock. Now you can book and order wine at lunchtime. Basically, I’m there.
My table is a thick wooden tablet jutting out from the wall along a narrow stretch of corridor. Great for a laptop and a flat white. Unthinkable for lunch. Once on my stool I’m back to back with the diner behind me, an intimacy inconceivable with a stranger in any Bruntsfield setting apart from this one, and, OK, an Iyengar yoga class. Once my pal, Francis, arrives, we ask to be moved.
Next stop: a pair of armchairs with a sliver of mid-century side table betwixt us. Great for a homemade Earl Grey iced tea with plum and Rosa rugosa, a tough Japanese rose variety that grows all over the UK’s sand dunes and pops up dried later, delivering a potpourri hit to our Turkish eggs. Again, not so great for lunch. Third time lucky: when a table in the tiny main room is freed up, we move again. I’m not moaning. This is how it goes in very small, very hip cafés.
I could eat everything on Margot’s day menu, then return for dinner. The menu is concise but complete. Lots of summery notes: minted garden peas threaded through the pearl barley risotto and a symphony of citrus singing everywhere. Lemons seem to be a Margot obsession (also yoghurt) and the best thing we eat is an intense lemon puree, made from the boiled pith, rind and flesh, coloured the crisp browning yellow of late-summer dandelions, spooned onto Turkish eggs. It tastes like the best preserved lemon of your life. So fresh, with just a little zinging bitterness, honey sweetness and floral top notes. Dear Margot: please start selling this by the jar. Those Turkish eggs are sumptuously conceived and plated, draped across silken garlicky yoghurt, rained on by sumac, Aleppo pepper, rose petals, dill fronds and coriander. With all this, a clean, citrusy organic macabeo from the little-known Spanish region of Manchuela. If it was later in the day I would have followed it with a 2022 Zweigelt Funkstille. The wine list — 23 by the glass in the evening — is brilliant.
Trout, hot smoked especially for Leftfield (and now Margot) by Skipness Smokehouse on Arran, has been mushed — unfortunately over-mushed — and trowelled atop lemon-laced yoghurt, plus pickled fennel for crunch. Whipped feta is the best I’ve had: nice and lumpy, profoundly salty, sheepy and barnyardy. A feta-hater’s food hell. As for me, I have to order focaccia (made by The Palmerston) if only to stop eating it off the spoon. Crispy new potatoes on more of that garlicky yoghurt have been softly smashed, or rather leant upon heavily with the back of a spoon until their sides split and they give way.
Service is too slow at first, an extra fried egg for our trout never shows up but then they forget to add our focaccia to the bill so it all works out. But the staff are lovely and enthused, as they should be. There are many cafés trying to do what Margot is doing but very few do it with such apparent ease, elan and integrity.
I leave with a takeaway slab of flawless, fudgey chocolate cake, a slightly dry, too salty cinnamon and blueberry blondie, and a little disappointment that the peach and thyme cake I had my eye on has sold out. Ah well. Yet another reason to return to the hottest more-than-a-café in town.
Margot, 7-8 Barclay Terrace, Edinburgh, margotedinburgh.co.ukFollow @chitgrrlwriter on InstagramFollow @Chitgrrl on X
Food 8Service 7Atmosphere 9
Turkish eggs, garlicky Greek yoghurt, bread,Aleppo pepper, lemon, honey, coriander, £13Leftfield hot smoked trout, citrus yoghurt, fennel slaw on sourdough, £13.80Extra fried egg, £2Crispy new potatoes, garlicky yoghurt, £7Whipped feta, thyme, lemon, chilli oil, £5Chocolate cake, £5Cinnamon and blueberry blondie, £4
Oat flat white, £3.60Living Things watermelon and lime, £3Homemade Earl Grey iced tea with plum and Rosa rugosa, £4Entero Old Vine Macabeo, Manchuela, Spain, 2022, £6.50
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