The Black Grape.

The Black Grape

Three weeks before the doors opened, on a street that sells shortbread by the ton, Gaby Soutar reported the promise: there will be no haggis bon-bons.2

Why go

Murray Ainslie spent twelve years at The Compass Group as operations and development manager, helping build the White Horse Oyster and Seafood Bar and the Chop House rooms, then put his own money into a single site on the Canongate in December 2022.2 His first flat was on the same street, at number 177. The building is Category A-listed and dates to the 1740s, and for thirty years before this it was Pancho Villas, whose owners retired in 2019.

The slope of the street gives the room two decks. The lower one is the bar, built around a sculpted terrazzo counter, with a ten-seat raised communal table beside it. Up the step is a thirty-eight-cover dining room in half-moon booths, and an alcove holding a three-quarter-circle table the room keeps for celebrations. Sixty covers in all.4

Head chef Owen Morrice came out of The King's Wark in Leith, and the card is grouped by raw, fish, and meat and game instead of by course.3 The opening kitchen bought fish from Welch, meat from Shaw's, cheese from I.J. Mellis, bread from Company Bakery and charcuterie from East Coast Cured, with wild greens off the foragers at Coeur Sauvage, all of it as stated in December 2022.2

Order this / avoid

• Order: the nduja scotch egg (GBP 13 on 4 August 2026). It is the one snack on the card doing something to a format everybody sells, and it sits in the price band where this kitchen is at its most convincing.8
• Order: the hand dived scallop (GBP 20.50). Diver-caught means one shell at a time by hand, so the meat arrives unbruised and free of the grit a dredge drags up, and it is the plate the fish section stands on.8
• Order: the confit duck leg croquette (GBP 11). Confit then shredded then fried is the cheapest craft on the list, and four plates and two glasses lands around GBP 45 to GBP 60 a head, so the GBP 11 plates are where the value sits.
• Order: Sour Grapes, the house aperitif, built by Joey Medrington, who took CLASS Magazine's Bartender of the Year title in 2010. Haku vodka, black grape cordial, lemon oil and Sauternes, with a single frozen grape on a swizzle stick that chills it as it goes.2 Sixteen originals sit on that list, most of them built on syrups and cordials the bar cooks itself, and the bar buys in little: Sipello gooseberry liqueur, Regal Rogue vermouth out of Australia.4
• Order: Pancho's Margarita. Ocho Blanco, pineapple, pressed lime, sea salt, heather honey from the Edinburgh Honey Co on Easter Road, and bee pollen dusted around the glass. It is a tribute to the cantina that held these walls for three decades.4
• Avoid: treating this as a wine cellar. Seventeen of the roughly thirty-four wines pour by the glass, which makes it a glass-led list you drink through in an evening. Depth is not what Ainslie is buying.8

What locals & experts say

• Gaby Soutar, The Scotsman (January 2023), ate here in the room's first six weeks and was mixed. On the squid: Next to arrive was the day boat squid (£12.50), which was a bit of a damp squib. … However, it all tasted completely nude and flat. It seemed as if they'd forgotten to dress or season this dish. Weird. She turned on the venison: The game was back on when it came to the haunch of venison (£14.50). She filled two boxes of her paper's five-part panel, ambience 8 and food 7.5, and the drink, service and value boxes were never published.1
• Richard Bath, Scottish Field (February 2023), ate three days later and came out the other way: the six dishes we enjoyed – and honestly, we massively enjoyed them – are as far from the comfort food at Leith's finest as you could get. His one refusal was a disappointingly underpowered blackcurrant and cherry sorbet. That, however, was a rare bum note in an otherwise memorable meal. Panchos is dead, long live the grape. The comfort food at Leith's finest is The King's Wark, the kitchen Morrice cooked in before this one, so Bath is measuring the chef against his own last room.3
• The two of them disagree, and the disagreement is the useful fact. They ate three days apart in the opening weeks, which is when a kitchen is least settled, and nobody has reviewed the room in the three and a half years since.
• Murray Ainslie, to SLTN (2023), on the cadence that governs everything you can order: We have a commitment to change our menu every 12 weeks. It is hard to say goodbye to some of the favourites. But we never want to be formulaic.4
• Scottish Licensed Trade News Awards: New Business of the Year 2023, won outright.5 The Wine Award 2024 and 2025, highly commended both years.6 The room's own site advertises award-winner status without separating the win from the two placings, so check which is which before you repeat it.

Good to know

• The wine, plainly: the list runs about thirty-four bottles plus Champagne, GBP 25 to GBP 140, built with the national wholesaler Hallgarten. What Ainslie buys from that book is unfamiliar grapes inside conventional winemaking, Piquepoul-Terret from the Côtes de Thau, Verdeca from Puglia, Treixadura from Ribeiro, Saperavi from Kakheti, a Sierra de Gata Garnacha field blend. Nothing on it is natural or low-intervention. The craft here is selection, and the buying route is one good wholesaler.4
• Hours: the venue publishes noon to midnight, seven days. Third-party listings carry two older patterns, so call before a late plan.8
• Booking: worth doing, through the site. Groups and the alcove table go through a separate enquiry form; private dining here means that table and a booth, not a room of its own.
• Price: small plates GBP 11 to GBP 15.50, fish GBP 14.50 to GBP 20.50, meat GBP 17.50 to GBP 24.50, sides GBP 5 to GBP 8.50, cheese board GBP 14.50, cocktails around GBP 12. Read on 4 August 2026.
• Hygiene: Food Hygiene Information Scheme Pass, inspected 12 June 2026, no re-inspection pending. Under two months old.9
• Getting there: the lower Canongate, near Canongate Kirk and a short walk from the Scottish Parliament. Cadenhead's Whisky Shop is at number 172, up the same side of the street.
• Name: the fruit. A search will offer you Shaun Ryder's group first.

Verdict

should-visit — Scotland's licensed trade put this room on the podium of its national wine category two years running, in 2025 behind Timberyard and alongside Ubiquitous Chip, which is the company the ladder should read it in. Timberyard is the city's benchmark and sits well above this; being highly commended behind it as a three-year-old sixty-cover room on the Royal Mile is a real placing and not a participation line. The craft case underneath is honest and limited: the list is about thirty-four bottles bought through one national wholesaler, so the buying is selection and not sourcing, and the entry says so. What lifts it is the kitchen and the bar rather than the cellar. A twelve-week rewrite held for three and a half years is genuine evolution, sixteen house cocktails built on syrups the bar cooks itself is a real programme, and refusing haggis bon-bons on the most touristed street in Scotland is a point of view that costs money to hold. Against FIN & GRAPE, the other shipped Edinburgh wine-and-food room, this one has the better drinks programme and the weaker kitchen record. It does not reach must-visit because the only two critics to eat here did so three days apart in the opening weeks, disagreed with each other, and nobody has been back in three and a half years, so there is no current verdict on the cooking at all.