Regular readers will have witnessed my increasing discomfort at the speed with which prices, especially at the pointy end of the Edinburgh market where the tasting menus roam free, have been rising. The pre-Covid days when you could pay for a meal for two and have change from £100 now seem like a lifetime ago, but over the past 12-18 months a whole bunch of menus have been launched that have upped the ante so markedly that, when you include paired wines and service, they set diners back by £200-300 *each* (my record was a meal for two was £650 and I don’t think I’ll ever recover). So I was intrigued to arrive at the Pompadour, which remains one of the smartest dining rooms in Edinburgh, to find that the six course tasting menu offered by incumbent new chef Dean Banks to mark the 120 anniversary of the Caledonian Hotel is ‘just’ £65 (although there’s a £12 supplement for the canapes and a £25 supplement for the lobster).
If, instead of having the paired wines at £60 per person, you have a bottle of wine at £39, you can have a meal out for £170 before service, which qualifies as an absolute fine dining bargain these days. This is a reversal of circumstances for the Pompadour. For several decades this fine dining salon in the Caledonian Hotel looking out on the castle was the smartest and most expensive in Edinburgh (one octogenarian I took there ten years ago was pleased to finally cross the threshold as she never went there as a young woman ‘because it was.
