Café St Honoré
Whole sides of venison, half a pig and legs of beef come through the door, and the chef's stated reason is that it is cheaper that way.5
Why go
Neil Forbes has run this kitchen as chef-director since February 2011, and his involvement goes back to 2008, when the bistro became an associate restaurant of the Atrium group he was executive chef of.3 The room itself is decades older than either date and its founding year is not on record anywhere reachable. The name is a dedication: Saint Honoré is the patron saint of pastry chefs.5 His route here is the part that shows on the plate: two years as chef de partie under David Wilson at The Peat Inn, off-season stints at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons and with Michel Roux at The Waterside Inn while he was sous chef on The Royal Scotsman, and then head chef at Nick Nairn's Braeval Mill, where he held on to the Michelin star after Nairn left. That star is his and Braeval's, and it has never belonged to this address.
The butchery reaches the plate as fat as much as meat. Forbes cooks a Borders venison loin by searing it and basting it in beef fat the kitchen has collected itself, and serves it on kale brose made from pinhead oats soaked overnight and finished like a risotto. His Cullen skink starts with Peterhead smoked haddock, heritage potatoes, cold-pressed rapeseed oil and Isle of Skye sea salt, then goes under a blitzed crust of cheddar, breadcrumbs and herbs that the kitchen browns off under the grill.5 He teaches the butchery to the younger chefs in the brigade.3 In 2016 the Soil Association gave this restaurant the first Organic Served Here award in the UK, at three stars out of five, on a measured 50 to 75 per cent of ingredients coming from certified organic producers.6 It has been a Sustainable Restaurant Association member since 2009 and took the association's national Society award in 2013, cited for a staff profit-share scheme and for putting local schoolchildren into the kitchen on work placements.3
The producers get their names on the menu, inside the dish titles, with a list at the foot of the page.8 Forbes puts the whole idea in one line: My restaurant may have a French name but it's firmly based in Scotland, we serve classic dishes using ingredients from local, small-scale producers.
5 He and his wife Sarah have also run a stall at the Edinburgh Farmers' Market on Saturday mornings since the pandemic shut the restaurant, selling Scotch eggs and meat and vegetarian bridies on their own pastry, with the fillings naming the same producers: Richard Briggs Native Shetland Lamb, Hugh Grierson organic beef, Peelham Farm chorizo and Selina Cairns' goats cheese.4
Order this / avoid
- Order: off the Cafe Classics menu, which is where the value is. The venue states it runs throughout both lunch and dinner service, and the Price note below sets the two menus against each other. On 3 August 2026 it ran cold roast lamb leg with Errington's Corra Linn, poached pear with Lanark Blue, and a pearl barley risotto with Isle of Wight tomato and Connage gouda.8
- Order: the Belhaven smoked trout, £16, with smoked cherries, pickled cucumber and Katy Rodgers' crowdie.
- Order: the charcuterie, £11, which pairs Peelham Farm's organic cure with Great Glen venison.
- Order: the Montezuma's organic dark chocolate fondant, £15. Forbes sells a take-home version of it at the market stall and describes that one this way:
It is the same as our most popular restaurant pudding.
4 - Order the fish if it is cod. Alison Gray's line on the coley she ate here was the shortest sentence in her review:
What a treat. I'm afraid I didn't share a mouthful.
1 - Avoid: the back bar if you drink white spirits. Claire Sawers found that
rum or vodka drinkers will find only Smirnoff or Bacardi,
and sent people to the fifteen or so Scottish single malts instead.2
What locals & experts say
- Alison Gray, The Scotsman, January 2016, scored the food 8 out of 10 and made sourcing the centre of the review:
Unlike in some other dining establishments, there can be no complaints about clarity of provenance here.
She recorded the mechanism, which is that suppliers are credited in the names of the dishes themselves.1 - Claire Sawers, Time Out Edinburgh, 2014, gave it four stars out of five and wrote that
The chefs clearly take the rules of the international Slow Food movement seriously
. Her example is the best sentence anyone has written about how this kitchen shops:if there's a sublime, but criminally overlooked variety of rhubarb, they'll track it down and bake it in an almond tart
.2 - Harden's reporters, across four successive survey editions, keep landing on the same two things. One line has it
'serves food as Elizabeth David might have ordered and admired' - 'long may it continue'.
Another records the commitment'to local small suppliers'
as outstanding, and a third describes arriving alone with no booking and being made very welcome. These are edited survey quotes rather than one critic's verdict.7 - Soil Association, Organic Served Here, 2016, three stars of five, and the first in the UK. Alison Muirhead of Soil Association Scotland put the number on it: the team are
sourcing 50 - 75 per cent of their ingredients from certified organic suppliers, which is a huge achievement.
6
Good to know
- Michelin: this room is widely assumed to hold a standing and it holds none. No Michelin page for it has ever existed on the guide's own site in any year the web has recorded, and no star and no Bib Gourmand is evidenced in any year. What circulates is a line of descriptive copy attributed to the guide, and the guide writes that about plenty of rooms it awards nothing to. What the evidence cannot reach is a printed edition from before roughly 2018.
- Hygiene: Food Hygiene Information Scheme Pass, inspected 25 August 2025, no re-inspection pending as at 4 August 2026. Eleven months old, so this is current.9
- Hours, and this is the fact that ruins trips: open Monday, closed Tuesday and Wednesday, then Thursday to Saturday for lunch from noon and dinner from 5pm. Sunday runs straight through from noon to 7.30pm and is the only unbroken service of the week.8
- Price: starters £16, mains £35, desserts £12 to £16 on the à la carte, so three courses is £63. Cafe Classics is £22, £30 and £38 for one, two and three courses at any hour of service. Read on 4 August 2026. For scale, mains were £14.50 to £21.50 in 2016 and there was an express lunch from £10.50 that no longer exists.
- Booking: taken online. Large tables and any query go by email or phone, which is the venue's own instruction and the closest thing to a size signal it publishes. Harden's records a solo walk-in being seated, so it is not a booking-only room. No source gives a cover count.
- Access: the venue states that some tables are down a small flight of stairs and that a specific table cannot be guaranteed. Say so when you book if that matters.
- Wine: a French-leaning list with around fifteen bottles by the glass, and roughly fifteen Scottish single malts behind the bar.
- Getting there: a cobbled lane off Thistle Street in the New Town, two minutes from Princes Street. Noto is 56 m away, the Scotch Malt Whisky Society 60 m, Lucky Liquor Co 81 m and tipo 140 m, so this corner is dense.
Verdict
should-visit — Whole animals come through the door and the chef says why: whole sides of venison, half a pig, legs of beef and whole chickens, bought that way because it is more economical, with the butchery taught down the brigade. What that buying puts on the plate is the reason to come. A Borders venison loin is seared and basted in beef fat the kitchen collects itself and served on kale brose made from pinhead oats soaked overnight. A Cullen skink is built on Peterhead smoked haddock and finished under a blitzed crust of cheddar, breadcrumbs and herbs. The producers are credited inside the dish names with a supplier list at the foot of the menu, and the same names run through sources a decade apart: Peelham Farm, Belhaven, Katy Rodgers, Montezuma's, Artisan Roast. The sustainability record is measured and not asserted, which is rare: the first Soil Association Organic Served Here award given in the UK, 2016, at three stars of five on 50 to 75 per cent of ingredients from certified organic producers, plus a 2013 national Sustainable Restaurant Association award citing a staff profit-share and school placements in the kitchen. Then look at the price. Three courses off the card is £63 and three Cafe Classics courses is £38, in the same room, off the same kitchen, at both lunch and dinner. That is Bib Gourmand arithmetic in a room carrying no guide standing at all. Neil Forbes's route here runs through The Peat Inn, Le Manoir, The Waterside Inn and Braeval Mill, where he held on to Nick Nairn's Michelin star after Nairn left, and that star is his and Braeval's and has never attached to this address. Two things keep it off the top rung. Nobody has assessed the cooking since Alison Gray scored the food 8 out of 10 in January 2016 and Claire Sawers gave four stars in 2014, so there is no career dish and no current verdict on the record. And the room opens Monday, shuts Tuesday and Wednesday, and puts some tables down a small flight of stairs. Take the set menu, take a Sunday, and eat whatever came in whole.