This is a new restaurant that only opened in Edinburgh a few months ago. The chef, Paul Kitching (not to be confused with Tom Kitchin of The Kitchin), had a Michelin-starred restaurant in Manchester, which won raves for his rather avant-garde cuisine. As I generally like weird food, this seemed up my alley. (Also, the early reviews of 21212 have been rapturous.)
The rather bizarre name of the restaurant reflects the menu structure. There are two options for a starter, followed by a fixed soup, then two options for a main course, followed by a fixed cheese course, and lastly two options for dessert. Nonetheless, 21212 is a stupid name for a restaurant. It sounds like a zip code. If I were them, I would change it.
I have very mixed feelings about 21212. On one hand, I thought a number of the dishes were quite interesting, and displayed a lot more character than most of the food at The Kitchin. To be honest, I would be more interested in returning to 21212 in a year’s time than in returning to The Kitchin, even though overall my experience at The Kitchin was better. I think in a year or two, once the chef works out the kinks, 21212 may be one of the best restaurants in Edinburgh, but currently I cannot quite recommend it.
Problem #1 is that the dishes generally either had too much going on or too little going on, to the extent that I don’t really remember what most of the dishes were. That is not necessarily a bad sign. Some of my favorite restaurants serve complex dishes that are hard to pin down. But some of the dishes at 21212 were hard to even make sense of while you were eating them.
Generally, my dining companions seemed to feel that the starters were the most successful of the 5 courses. (My friend Leaf said that his scallop appetizer, which I did not taste, was the culinary highlight of his trip to Edinburgh.) The soup course, a shellfish bisque with a lot of foam, didn’t do much for me, although others liked it. The main courses were not very popular, although I really liked mine.
This seemed to be a common tendency. There were several dishes that produced rather polarized responses, with one person loving it and another finding it very disappointing. Perhaps the oddest point in this respect was a strongly spiced “mini-scone” (which we referred to as the “doughy thing”) that was buried inside the all-over-the-place beef main course that most of us ordered. I thought the scone was awesome, and for me it made the dish come together, but everyone else hated it. (Same thing for the bread that was served with the meal, which I adored but others found too strongly spiced.) I’m not sure what to make of this phenomenon. In some ways, I think it’s a good thing, because it indicates the chef is doing something different. But it is unusual to see it happen in such an expensive restaurant.
Problem #2 is that the courses were of strangely unbalanced size. The first three courses were quite small, smaller than I would have expected given that it’s a 5-course menu, not 7 or 8 courses. But the cheese course was huge. Four big slabs of cheese were brought out to be shared. Frankly, this course was disappointing. Three of the four cheeses were totally standard cheeses that I get in my local cheese shop in Saarbruecken. And why was this course so huge while the others were so small? For me, this disparity is a key reason I cannot currently recommend the restaurant.
But I would keep an eye on 21212. It was the most interesting restaurant I ate at in Edinburgh, and I expect it will improve over time.
Price range: Expensive (75–100 GBP)
Rating: B / B-
