Montrose

Wine by the glass here comes out of a bag-in-box, and the staff decant it into its own small carafe at the table, so a six-pound pour arrives with the ritual normally kept for a bottle.

Why go

The Radford family opened Timberyard on Lady Lawson Street in 2012 and took a late-19th-century inn at the top of Montrose Terrace to open this, with the ground-floor wine bar trading from autumn 2023.7 Timberyard head chef James Murray is a partner in it and Moray Lamb leads the kitchen, stating his ethos as Source great, seasonal produce. Cook it well and season it perfectly.2 The building holds two restaurants with two soundtracks. Downstairs is a 30-cover bar doing small plates with rock music on. Upstairs is seven tables and fifteen seats up a winding staircase, candlelit, bare brick, birdsong on a single speaker and palo santo burning.1 Anna Sebelova runs one drinks programme across this room and Timberyard, and the list here is capsule-free and 100% organic.2 The menus are rewritten weekly.8

Order this / avoid

Order: the Spenwood and girolle tart, downstairs at the bar. Spenwood is a hard sheep's milk cheese, and Jake Missing's only complaint was the portion: our only complaint about this little luxurious tart is why there's only half of it on the plate.4
Order: the game sausage on fregola, which Peter Simpson rated all black pepper and char, supremely juicy, with the little pasta balls keeping their bite when they're flopping around in incredibly unctuous sausage fat.3
Order: upstairs, eat the snacks slowly, because they are a course. Smoked eel and radish flatbread, Dexter beef croquettes with a dot of walnut ketchup, and hip-flask-sized seeded rolls with whipped sesame and pickled cucumber, spread with a wooden knife.1
Order: a glass over a bottle, because the small-carafe service is the trick of the place. Simpson's verdict on it: tiny glassware hits that mark pretty spectacularly.3
Avoid: the crudités. The sesame and almond dip is excellent and the pickles are balanced, and Simpson still stopped twice to say it: it's £8 for crudités.3

What locals & experts say

Gaby Soutar, The Scotsman (January 2024): on the langoustine course, where green Sichuan oil stood in for Tabasco, which provided a lovely gentle tingle, like Tiger Balm on the tongue. It was knife licking stuff. She left the upstairs room saying Even if the chef had offered me a massage, I probably couldn't have loved this place more.1
Peter Simpson, The Skinny (2024): downstairs is comfy, cosy and expertly put together, with some moments of flash and unexpectedness that leave you wondering quite what's just happened.3
Jake Missing, The Infatuation (November 2025), 8.6 out of 10: There's a pulsating, hectic energy that's cut through by precise and thrilling food.4
Good Food Guide Awards 2025, Drinks List of the Year: won on 3 February 2025, jointly as Timberyard & Montrose, ahead of KOL & Fonda and Cornus in London and Osip in Somerset. The guide's own entry reads Fabulous drinks and sophisticated cooking in singularly stylish surrounds.5
Harden's diner survey (2025): An exceptional all-round favourite, with the food marked 4 of 5 and the room 3.7
MICHELIN Guide (2026): in the guide, with no star and no Bib Gourmand. The star in this family sits at Timberyard.10
Local rec: Jeff traces this one to The Times and to Timberyard. His own words are below.

Good to know

Timing: closed Monday and Tuesday. Thursday from 5pm, Friday to Sunday from noon, and a Wednesday dinner service is added in July and August.8
Late: Harden's 2025 survey and The Skinny's 2024 listing both print a midnight close, while the restaurant's own site now says only "Late". Work on midnight and call ahead if the last hour matters.
Booking: advised, and the site holds walk-in space. Upstairs is fifteen seats, so that is the room to book.
Price: three courses at £25 for lunch, Friday to Sunday, noon to 2.30pm, set menu only. The upstairs menu is four courses at around £80 including canapés and petits fours. Downstairs small plates ran £4 to £20 in January 2024. Wine starts at £36 a bottle and service is 12.5%.
Pace: four courses, all the snacks, the truffles, the financiers and three drinks came in under 90 minutes on Gaby Soutar's visit. Good if you have a train, worth knowing if you wanted the evening to last.
Eating alone: the downstairs bar serves food, and the oysters and the tart are bar orders.
Hygiene: Food Hygiene Information Scheme Pass, inspected 25 January 2024, with no re-inspection published as at 3 August 2026. That is two and a half years old, which is too old to say anything about the kitchen as it stands now. Read it as an aged check and not a clean bill.9
Getting there: Montrose Terrace at the Abbeyhill end, about a kilometer east of the top of Leith Walk and walking distance uphill from Holyrood.

Jeff's take (his words)

Note: "Times rec from timberyard. More awards, cheaper casual version. Visit!"
On the cheaper casual version: it checks out twice over. The ground floor is a wine bar at small-plate money, and the weekend lunch upstairs is three courses for £25 against about £80 at night.

Verdict

should-visit — This is the Timberyard kitchen's answer to what it would cook without the tablecloth budget, and three separate critics who paid for their own dinner all landed positive on it. Moray Lamb runs the pass with Timberyard head chef James Murray a partner in the room, the ethos Lamb states is to source well and season properly, and the plates back it: langoustine with celeriac under a green Sichuan oil that Gaby Soutar called knife licking stuff, a game sausage The Skinny calls all black pepper and char, a Spenwood and girolle tart The Infatuation wanted twice as much of. The drinks are the strongest single argument. Anna Sebelova runs one capsule-free, fully organic list across both restaurants, that list won Drinks List of the Year at the Good Food Guide Awards 2025, and the by-the-glass service pours bag-in-box wine into individual carafes so the bar treats a six-pound glass seriously. It stops short of must-visit because this is a strong version of a format Edinburgh has several of, the guide lists it with no distinction, and the fifteen seats upstairs now run to about eighty pounds a head. The downstairs bar at small-plate money is the send, and the twenty-five-pound weekend lunch is the cheapest way into the cooking.

Montrose.