Mara's Picklery.

Mara's Picklery

The day's menu is written by hand on a roll of paper, off the organic veg box that arrived and whatever is currently fermenting.4

Why go

Eilish Leyland-Jones cooks and Pragnesh Patel runs the floor, and the two met at a vineyard in New Zealand.1 They opened this in March 2024 with twenty-two covers across four tables, and built the kitchen around preserving. Chitra Ramaswamy named the mechanism: The complexity of flavour here is delivered not by lengthy cooking times or fancy kit, but the cunning and thriftiness of pickling, preserving, fermenting, curing and canning. That is a technique argument, and it is the reason a plate of vegetables here tastes like it spent hours over heat. The veg box comes from Phantassie, the East Lothian organic grower, the burrata from I.J. Mellis, the bread from Company Bakery and the kombucha from Julia's in Stockbridge.4 Most of the list is vegetables, with pork achaari and a rillette turning up often enough that calling it vegetarian would be wrong. The drinks follow the same logic as the food: house sodas, shrubs and switchels made in the kitchen, and you bring your own wine.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the pickle plate first, on Murray Chalmers's instruction: start with the pickle plate, served with excellent bread from Company Bakery, and then just order as much as you can eat. Jake Missing on the same plate: As for the fresh sourdough and pickle butter. Well, it's inspired.3
• Order: the whole roast carrots. Ramaswamy's favourite of her visit and the most humble thing on the table: hulking, fat, gnarly carrots, roasted whole, skin on, to intensify their sweetness and softness, laid on a bed of silky whipped feta, drizzled with honey, sriracha and chewy baked chickpeas.1
• Order: the aubergine plate if it is on. Chalmers on the version he ate, with harissa, sunflower tahini, cherries and dates: non-negotiable.3
• Order: a house ferment to drink. The cherry soda is Missing's pick, luminous, and naturally fermented and bursting with the flavour of fresh cherry.2
• Order: a toastie to take away at lunch, sourdough with falafel, chilli jam and sweet potato, or with mature cheddar, apple and chilli jam. The Meadows are eight minutes north.5
• Avoid: arriving with a dish in mind. The menu is handwritten daily and the venue's own page calls what it publishes a sample that changes regularly.5
• Avoid: buying wine on the way if you want the full picture of what this kitchen does. Ramaswamy's line on BYOB is that going straight to the bottle means missing half the fun of the ferments.1

What locals & experts say

• Murray Chalmers, Scots Ink (September 2024), wrote the strongest judgment on the cooking, six months after it opened: It's no exaggeration to say we could have eaten everything from this menu where each dish was quietly revelatory, challenging flavour preconceptions in a way that was neither mannered nor misguided. He also called the Hokkaido pumpkin with yoghurt, maple, pomegranate and house dukkah the best GBP 10 you will spend in a restaurant all year.3
• Jake Missing, The Infatuation (November 2025), scored it 8.4 out of 10 and said it in one sentence: for a special, countrified lunch not far from the middle of Edinburgh, there's nowhere better. On the pickle plate: The kohlrabi on this pickle plate really stands out. It's subtle, but a vehicle for the flavour of coriander seeds and more.2
• Vivian Maeda, Bite Magazine (May 2025), on the dish that shows what the fridge is for: cherry tomato kimchi on a bed of labneh, drizzled with sriracha, honey, and sesame, served with slices of sourdough. It's a revelation. She also got a look inside: jars of pickles and ferments, and pickled kumquats to finish, bright, zesty.4
• Chitra Ramaswamy, The Times (October 2024), on the house drinks: the shrubs are intensely fruity and tangy (tangy is a word you can't help overusing here), and the switchel is a bit like a kombucha, though not fizzy.1
• No award. The five Scottish award rosters, the Michelin Edinburgh listings and Time Out Edinburgh's February 2026 restaurant list were all searched on 4 August 2026 and none of them names this address. The Infatuation guide placement is a list entry and not an award.

Good to know

• Hours: lunch Wednesday to Sunday from noon, running to five on Saturday and to three otherwise. Dinner is Thursday, Friday and Saturday only, with the last seating at eight. Closed Monday and Tuesday.5
• Booking: four tables, twenty-two covers. Book.2
• Bring your own wine. Cork & Cask is the shop Ramaswamy sends people to.1
• Price: Chalmers ate a lot in September 2024 and the bill came to GBP 40 for two including a kombucha, with the pumpkin at GBP 10 and house drinks at GBP 3 to 4. Those figures are nearly two years old, and the venue publishes no prices at all now.3
• Hygiene: Food Hygiene Information Scheme Pass, inspected 17 April 2024, which is two years and four months ago. Nothing newer has been published about these premises, so treat it as missing information.7
• A different Mara: there is a bar and restaurant called Mara at 58 Shore in Leith, four kilometres away, and a Mara in Aberdeen carrying a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Three separate businesses, no shared operator found for any pair.
• Getting there: 21c Strathearn Road, on the seam where Marchmont meets the Grange. Every source that names a district says Marchmont; the postcode says the Grange.

Jeff's take (his words)

Four bylined critics have been and all four wrote about the same thing, which is what the preserving does to a plate of vegetables.

Verdict

should-visit — Three bylined writers in three outlets went to a four-table room and all three came back describing the same thing, which is what preserving does to a plate of vegetables. Chalmers, six months after it opened: each dish was quietly revelatory, challenging flavour preconceptions in a way that was neither mannered nor misguided. Missing scored it 8.4 and put the verdict in one sentence, that for a special, countrified lunch not far from the middle of Edinburgh there is nowhere better. Ramaswamy in The Times named the mechanism, and the mechanism is the whole argument: complexity built by pickling, fermenting, curing and canning in a kitchen with no fancy kit. That converges from three directions on craft, which is what the top of this rubric weighs. The kitchen rewrites its menu by hand every day off the Phantassie box and the ferment crocks, and the drinks follow the same rule with house sodas, shrubs and switchels made in the room, so the movement is real and it is in both the glass and the plate. Value lands with it: GBP 40 for two after ordering a lot, a GBP 10 dish a critic said could be the best tenner spent in a restaurant all year, house ferments at GBP 3 to 4, and no corkage reported on the BYOB. What keeps it off the top rung is that there is no award of any kind, checked across five Scottish rosters, the Edinburgh award-leads file and the Michelin Edinburgh roll; no career dish anybody names twice; and no Edinburgh restaurant critic has ever walked in. The strongest published verdict is a lunch superlative with its own qualifier attached to it. So: rearrange an afternoon, book ahead because there are twenty-two seats, and go at lunch on a Saturday when the room runs to five.