manger à la mort: Amber at The Scotch Whisky Experience

I tend not to write down a great deal when visiting places I intend to put on this blog. Maybe one or two notes punched into my phone. Usually I just take a few photos and hope that all the details will come rushing back later like some Proustian epiphany. Unfortunately this tends to be a cocky over-estimation of my capacity for recollection. It gets worse the longer I wait to get motivated and actually put fingertip to keyboard. Drinking with the meal just compounds the issue by an order of magnitude.

With that in mind: it has been at least 5 months since my buddy Tom and I were in Scotland; I wrote down absolutely nothing; this post is about a restaurant attached to a whisky museum where we were treated to five different single malts; we went to the bar and had at least that many more again after the meal (with which there was beer).

Happily the whisky made us fairly trigger happy with the cameras and we took several photos. I really can't remember very much at all so hopefully the pictures will make up for the words I would otherwise just be making up entirely.

I do remember this: the food at Amber is genuinely impressive and undoubtedly the best we had in Edinburgh's Old Town. I tried Haggis, 'Neeps & Tatties from four or five different places on our visit and this was the clear favourite. Haggis gets a bum rap by the way; the stuff is legitimately delicious. Too many people get grossed out by its reputation before they actually try it. If you're in Edinburgh and want to give it a go, you could do far worse than Amber's. There is a photo here of some kind of terrine that I seem to remember containing venison and a little blob of rosemary infused jelly that was original and quite delicious.

On to the photos. The final is one Tom took of me in Makars' Court shortly after which I feel is a fairly appropriate expression of how I felt about the whole dining and drinking experience at Amber.