Nishiki.

Nishiki

A Japanese breakfast service, 9am to 11.30am, in a city that has almost none.

Why go

Nishiki is the second restaurant from the team behind Yamato on Lochrin Terrace, which Gaby Soutar has been calling her favourite Japanese restaurant in Edinburgh for years.1 This one is izakaya-style and it is built as the bright opposite number to the parent room: sliding doors, pale wood, paper lanterns, and a look the owners call Japandi. One room holds a large communal table, another holds a bar, and there are booths for two. The lunch list is pared back next to Yamato's, with a couple of rice dishes, three ramen or udon, sashimi, small plates and a few seafood dishes. The breakfast runs 9am to 11.30am, with shokupan French toast with banana and miso caramel, and nori avocado toast.2 It is not in the 2026 MICHELIN guide.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the grilled langoustines with kombu and shiitake butter (£16 in September 2025). Three halved crustaceans, with flesh Soutar described as as pale and velvety as an ermine's coat, and the butter kept subtle enough to add an earthy and luxuriant note to the sweetness. Her verdict was Another 10/10 dish.1
• Order: the hamachi sashimi with ponzu (£9). Four pads of fish on shredded daikon nests, doused in the citrus. Soutar's whole note on it: So dreamy.1
• Order: the kawa yakitori (£5), folded pieces of chicken skin threaded on skewers and "polka-dotted with blackened blisters from the grill." One skewer each, and it is the plate that opens the appetite.
• Order: the miso aubergine (£8), which arrives as an entire half rather than the usual slab, hot the whole way through.1
• Avoid: building a whole meal from small plates. Soutar ordered five to share and said so plainly: we'd slightly underordered and everything we'd had was very light. Add the eel rice or a bowl of noodles.1

What locals & experts say

• Gaby Soutar, The Scotsman (September 2025): she filed it under the claim that this is the city's newest and best Japanese restaurant, and closed with Overall, this is such a wonderful new addition to the street, and to the city. On the room: While Yamato is atmospherically moody and dimly lit inside, Nishiki is light and bright.1
• Gaby Soutar, The Scotsman (November 2025): on her own shortlist off 43 new-restaurant reviews for the year, where she wrote that the food is perfect and singled out the breakfast as the intriguing part of the offer.2

Good to know

• Hygiene: the Food Hygiene Information Scheme rates this premises Improvement Required, the failing rating in the Scottish scheme, from a City of Edinburgh inspection on 22 December 2025. No re-inspection was pending as at 3 August 2026, so that is the rating in force and it is around seven and a half months old. Current information, and it sits alongside the recommendation rather than behind it.3
• Price: skewers £5, small plates and sashimi £8 to £9, langoustines £16, matcha soft serve £4, Ramune sodas £5. Those are September 2025 lunch prices.
• Breakfast: 9am to 11.30am. Shokupan French toast, nori avocado toast.
• Groups: one room is built around a large communal table, which is unusual enough in Edinburgh to be worth knowing if you are six.
• Getting there: 151-155 Morrison Street, by Haymarket and a short walk from the conference centre.

Jeff's take (his words)

• Note: "New sake bar"
• On the description: the only published review describes an izakaya-style restaurant with a bar in one of its rooms and "a good list of wine and summer sake." Jeff files it as a sake bar. It is filed here as a restaurant, on the format the review describes, and the disagreement stays open until somebody reads the drinks list.

Verdict

should-visit — This is the second room from the Yamato team, and the critic who calls Yamato her favourite Japanese restaurant in Edinburgh reviewed this one under the headline that it is the city's newest and best. The plates back it: langoustines split and grilled under kombu and shiitake butter, hamachi with ponzu over shredded daikon, chicken-skin yakitori blistered on the grill, and a miso aubergine served as a whole half where most kitchens send a slab. Nothing on the lunch list clears £16. It also runs a Japanese breakfast from 9am to 11.30am, with shokupan French toast in banana and miso caramel, which almost nothing else in Edinburgh does. Two things hold it below must-visit. The FHIS rates the premises Improvement Required from a December 2025 inspection with nothing pending since, which is current information. And the entire published case is one critic at one masthead.