The Mother Superior
In 2025 this bar was one of four shortlisted for Scotland's Whisky Bar of the Year, and it lost to a pub that has been open since 1897.
Why go
Jane Ross got the keys to 96-98 Leith Walk in April 2020, refurbished the place through lockdown and opened in July.3 The unit had traded as Bar Brig and before that as Bar Sienne.6 She picked the area deliberately: I knew I wanted to be down in Leith because of the community there. It reminded me of home.
3 She arrived at whisky through the trade rather than through a course. After moving from Dublin in 2009 she started behind the bar at the Corn Exchange, joined The Black Cat in 2013 because it specialised in whisky, and worked up to General Manager there over seven years while finishing degrees in business studies and in architectural technology. She puts the count since at around 15,000 whiskies tasted in seven years, obviously not had a full dram of them all, I still have a functioning liver!
3 Her own drinking runs one way and the shelf follows it: My personal favourites are smoky, peaty, cask strength whisky, particularly from Islay.
Whisky is the specialism and the trade has now measured it twice. In 2025 the Scottish Bar & Pub Awards shortlisted the bar for Benromach Whisky Bar of the Year, one of four names, and gave Ross the Whisky Guru Rising Star Award in her own right at the same ceremony. Below the bar there is a basement events room, which is where her whisky show runs. The business has been strong enough to fund two more of her venues, on a turnover of £650,000 in the year to autumn 2024.3
Order this / avoid
- Order: an Islay bottle at cask strength. That is the owner's own taste, on the record, and it is the part of the shelf she is buying hardest.
- Order: a dram picked with the staff. The shortlisting is a judgment about a whisky offer and the people running it, and it is the strongest published signal this bar has.
- Order: the spice bag if you are eating. Salt and chilli chips with chicken and vegetables under Irish curry sauce, and the menu makes its own case:
Sure, it's a modern Irish classic!!
The Irish stew is the other one, built on Guinness with mash and soda bread.4 - Order: a ticket to the basement if anything is on. Live music runs Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday, and there is a quiz on Monday.6
- Order: Whisky and Witches if the dates line up, Ross's own show with singer-songwriter Christine Kammerer, built on five single malt expressions explored
through storytelling, folklore, humour and music.
5 - Avoid: planning on cask. A handpump went in during October 2024 and came out again in June 2026, and CAMRA now records cask ale as not available. There is keg real cider.6
What locals & experts say
- Scottish Bar & Pub Awards 2025, Benromach Whisky Bar of the Year (finalist): shortlisted and beaten. Rosalind Erskine's Scotsman report of the ceremony puts the field in one sentence: the Athletic Arms
beat The Belfry in Edinburgh; Mother Superior in Edinburgh and The Pot Still in Glasgow.
1 Larder Magazine's pre-ceremony roster prints the same four names.2 - Scottish Bar & Pub Awards 2025, Whisky Guru Rising Star Award (win): this one is Jane Ross's, not the bar's. She took it personally at the same ceremony. It says something real about who is choosing the whisky and nothing directly about the room, and it is recorded that way here.8
- Edinburgh Bar Awards 2025, Best Pub, highly commended: the city's own drinks programme put this bar second in its pub category behind Nauticus, a month after the national whisky shortlisting ran its ceremony. That vote is half public and half trade by the organiser's published method, so it measures how Edinburgh rates the room and not how a judge rates the whisky.9
- Nicola Walker, DRAM (October 2024), came to this bar to interview its owner and wrote down how Ross struck her:
Jane Ross is certainly a well-loved character in the Edinburgh bar scene and it's easy to see why. When I caught up with her at The Mother Superior in Edinburgh, the first bar that she opened, before long I felt like she was an old friend.
That is a judgment about the welcome and about the person, from a named trade writer who was in the room.3 - Gordon Davidson, Scottish Licensed Trade News (2023), on what Ross does with a dram in front of an audience: she
brings whisky to life with her theatrical tasting notes.
5 - Nobody has reviewed the drinking. No critic has written about what this bar pours, and The List's own roundup of nine Edinburgh whisky bars leaves it out.10
Good to know
- Timing: noon to 1am Monday to Thursday, 11am to 1am Friday to Sunday, off the bar's own pages. Live music Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday, quiz on Monday.4
- Walk in. No booking system published.
- Lunch: weekdays 12:30 to 3:30, any main with a draught glass at £9 or with a pint at £12. That is the cheap way into the kitchen; mains otherwise run £7 to £14, and a Whisky Sour is £9.4
- The basement: Swannys Cellar, an events space available to hire, and it was closed for a year after a Scottish Water leak, so check it is running before travelling for a show.3
- Food: the kitchen has been rented out to a separate operator, King of Feasts, so the food offer moves independently of the bar.3 What it currently cooks is Irish: colcannon soup, Guinness stew, a chicken fillet roll, a spice bag. Coverage from the 2020 opening described Louisiana soul food and the listing sites still repeat it.4
- The name: it comes from a Trainspotting line the bar quotes itself,
We called him Mother Superior on account of the length of his habit.
4 - Who else is welcome: dogs, and children until 6pm if they are eating. There are pavement tables.6
- Hygiene: the Food Standards Agency register rates the premises Pass, inspected 12 February 2025, which is about eighteen months old. The record is filed as "The Mother Superior (Wet Sales)", meaning it covers the drinks side, and the kitchen is a separate operator's.
- Same owner, other rooms: Ross opened The Powder Room on Broughton Road and The False Widow on Constitution Street in 2024. Different premises, different records.
- Getting there: Leith Walk, 250m from the Foot of the Walk tram stop.
Jeff's take (his words)
- Note: "Whisky bar finalist"
- Correct, and the repo previously had this wrong. An earlier evidence pass concluded no shortlist existed for this bar and filed the note as unverifiable. It does exist: the Scottish Bar & Pub Awards shortlisted it for Whisky Bar of the Year in 2025, and two independent sources print the four-name field.
Verdict
should-visit — Jane Ross took the keys to a shut Leith Walk bar in April 2020, refurbished it through lockdown, opened in July, and five years later the room was one of four whisky bars shortlisted for Scotland's Whisky Bar of the Year. It lost to a pub that has been pouring since 1897, which is a respectable way to lose. She also won the trade's Rising Star award for whisky in her own name the same night, and the bar's turnover funded two further venues, so the trajectory is real and documented. What holds it here rather than higher is a genuine evidence gap: no critic has published a verdict on the drinking, and the bottle count that would make the case concrete is not in any citable source. Go for the shortlisting and the basement music, and expect a good independent bar rather than a settled institution.