Edinburgh.

Café St Honoré is the first booking I make for a night like this. Its Cafe Classics menu runs £22, £30 and £38 for one, two and three courses at any hour of service, and the kitchen buys whole sides of venison, half a pig and legs of beef, which is where the cooking comes from. Read the diary before you promise a date, because the room trades on Monday, closes Tuesday and Wednesday, and runs its one unbroken service on Sunday from noon into the early evening. Say when you book if stairs are a problem, since the venue states that some tables sit down a small flight and that it cannot promise you a particular one.

Stockbridge Eating House suits four people who want to hear each other. The room seats eighteen, cooks hare and devilled mussels, prices starters at £14 and lamb chops at £29, and builds two of its mains for two people to share. Over in Leith, The Little Chartroom takes the same evening up a level: Mark Donald, who holds two MICHELIN stars at Glenturret Lalique, eats there and gives one ordering instruction, Roberta is very good with game, so I'd go for the game. Book it, because nobody publishes a menu price for that room and Donald's own advice is that you probably will not get in on spec.

When they want the grand Edinburgh room, Café Royal has held its corner since 1826. Reserve the seated Oyster Bar through the back on Harden's advice, since the front bar takes walk-ins and tour companies block-book it most months. Three house rules decide who comes with you: children of five and over are welcome in the restaurant, nobody under 18 is admitted to the bar at all, and the venue states that it has no accessible toilets.

Take a mixed table of eight to a food hall, where everyone orders from a different counter and nobody negotiates a menu. Bonnie & Wild's Scottish Marketplace in the St James Quarter runs nine kitchens and about 400 seats, from Gary Maclean's seafood counter to Sri Lankan curry and vegan, and the venue's own line is No need to book, even for large groups. One current trader, Chooks, holds an Improvement Required from March 2024, and the page says so.

The Pitt Market is the same answer with an indoor hall and a children's area, Thursday to Sunday in Granton. Email the market to hold space for a party over eight, walk in free from the Granton Promenade, and eat across Nepalese, Lebanese and Japanese-Scottish stalls, with Lazeez fully halal. Read the hygiene line on that page first: the two registered food traders hold a Pass and the bar operation holds an Improvement Required from May 2025. In August, Assembly George Square Gardens is the walk-up food-truck version, serving into the small hours most nights with no booking taken or needed.

If you want one table with one kitchen, two rooms price a group in advance. The Radhuni in Loanhead runs banquets from six people at £35.95 a head in a dedicated group room, seats twelve without a negotiation, and its vegetarian mains are £13.95, so the two people at your table who eat no meat order off the same card as everyone else. Call ahead, because the banquets are pre-ordered. The Magnum pre-orders a fixed-price three-course menu for parties of eight and up, which few New Town rooms will do, and Memed takes parties from one to twenty on its own form with a £9.50 plate for a child.

David Bann is the booking when someone at the table eats no meat, because the whole menu has been meat-free since 2002 and the group set starts at six covers at £26.50 for two courses. Harden's diners put the case better than the label does: I go there because the food's delicious and the service lovely, not because it's vegetarian.

The pub kitchens are what serve at half five in this city, and several of them are good. The Ox in Broughton runs its kitchen from noon into the late evening every day and half an hour longer on Friday and Saturday, takes its last booking as the kitchen closes, welcomes children for an hour beyond that and keeps biscuits for the dog; its Sunday roasts are £20 to £25. The Doric serves food all day in the Old Town, moves the evening service up to the first floor, prints a children's menu and, on CAMRA's February 2025 survey, admits children downstairs until early evening and in the first-floor restaurant late into the night. That menu marks its vegetarian, vegan and non-gluten-containing dishes and the kitchen will alter some of them on request, so one card covers a table with mixed diets at it.

Three more rooms open early enough to matter. Roseleaf in Leith trades from ten in the morning seven days a week and stops the kitchen in the late evening, with the chunky Cullen skink at £10.95. The Radhuni starts its evening service in the late afternoon on Friday and Saturday and runs straight through from early afternoon on Sunday, and it keeps a family zone inside a 120-cover room. The Magnum admits children late into the evening, has a garden with tables, and holds a two-course table d'hôte at £25 for anyone seated before the dinner rush, Monday to Saturday, so an early sitting catches the cheap end of the card.

The small rooms say plainly that they cannot take a buggy, and that saves you a phone call. LeftField publishes the whole answer on its reservations page: children at lunch only, no children's menu, no highchair and nowhere to park a buggy. Phil White cooks 24 covers alone in that kitchen, and the same arithmetic governs the other twenty-seat rooms on this list. All of this comes off the venues' own published hours, which move, so call before you build an evening on one.

Gaby Soutar wrote in The Scotsman that a main course under twenty pounds is close to impossible to find here, and she wrote it about Barry Fish on the Shore, her best lunch of 2025, where the house-smoked haddock kedgeree and the fishcakes are both £16. That is the line the rooms below sit under.

The counters stretch the money furthest. Oink sells hog roast rolls in single figures and a 250g at £11.95, from late morning until the pork runs out. Lannan Bakery charged £3 for a cardamom bun and £3.60 for a pain au raisin when anybody last printed a figure, in 2023, and it publishes a way past the queue: orders open weekly on the bakery's own website up to a week ahead and are collected at the Pantry, which has its own entrance on Hamilton Place and sells no pastries over its counter. Archipelago Bakery keeps a vegan soup on every day beside dairy-free and vegan cakes, and its own 2022 copy prices soup with bread at £5.50 and a scone at £2.60, which you should treat as last known.

The chippies hold the tenner. The Fishmarket at Newhaven sold its fish supper at £10 to £12 across three sizes in 2018, and Tom Kitchin named it when Sky News asked where a chef eats well for under £40; the counter queues separately from the dining room, so decide which one you are joining before you set off. The Chippy by Spencer opened its mixed fish supper at £13 and a seaweed-wrapped aubergine supper at £6.50 for the vegan at the table, and both figures are five years old now. L'Alba D'Oro will fry your fish alla Romana with sage and onions, which no other counter here offers.

Four kitchens sell their own cooking at lunch for £25 or less. Montrose runs three courses at £25 over a short Friday-to-Sunday lunch, set menu only, against about £80 upstairs at night. NADAIR in Marchmont did two courses at £25 and three at £30 at weekend lunch when Harden's and Scottish Field printed it in autumn 2024, against £65 a head for five courses at dinner. The Magnum holds a two-course table d'hôte at £25 before the dinner rush, Monday to Saturday. David Bann prices lunch at £24.50 for two courses and £31 for three, Sunday to Friday, and every dish on it is meat-free.

The student quarter's best cheap table is Mara's Picklery in Marchmont. Murray Chalmers ate his way across it in September 2024 and the bill came to £40 for two including a kombucha, with the Hokkaido pumpkin at £10 that he called the best £10 you will spend in a restaurant all year. Book, because four tables hold twenty-two covers, and note that it closes Monday and Tuesday.

Skua is the cheap one that comes with a warning. Skua in Stockbridge holds a MICHELIN Bib Gourmand and priced every plate on the reviewed menu between £6 and £10, with its only dessert at £3. The premises also holds an Improvement Required from an inspection on 27 May 2026, the failing grade of the Scottish scheme, and ten weeks makes that current information. Both facts stand, and you should book with both of them in front of you.