The Edinburgh bar that transports you to Venice

I visited Venice a few years back and asked a Venetian friend for restaurant recommendations. “Most restaurants in Venice are molto costoso,” she warned, urging me to swerve any tourist traps with photos of dishes outside like sticky fly paper. She suggested a Venetian bar crawl instead. No, not a cowboy hat-wearing hen party with willy straws: she meant a wander around the lagoon’s preposterously good-looking bridges and labyrinthine backstreets, stopping at divey bacari (wine bars) for dinner in cheap, elegant instalments. And so it was that I discovered cicchetti: Venetian appetisers such as calamari on cocktail sticks eaten while leaning at a buzzy counter, arancini nibbled on a boat, fritto misto savoured on a folding wooden chair next to a moonlit canal.
Since 2018, Edinburgh has had its own cicchetti bar — a place where West End office workers can get more than just a bag of sweet chilli Pipers with their after-work pint. We visit the West Room at lunchtime during the Edinburgh festival when Royal Mile crowds are turgid like the throngs of selfie-seekers in Piazza San Marco. A couple are drinking chilled white wine at a sunny pavement table and a family with teenagers are perched on high stools inside, twirling tagliatelle around forks.
Inside, one wall of the narrow room is lined to the ceiling with bottles of Edinburgh gin, Grey Goose, Espolon Tequila, chilled prosecco. I can’t see Cynar on the menu — the Italian artichoke bitter that became my regular aperitif on that Venice trip, served on the rocks with an orange slice. But they do have many Venetian and Italian wines plus negronis four ways; the Classic, the Sbagliato with fizz (sbagliato means “mistaken” — the cocktail was reportedly invented by accident in the 1970s before enjoying a TikTok revival two years ago), the West Room with Edinburgh Cannonball gin and the Boulevardier with Wild Turkey bourbon. It’s a hot day outside so I’m drawn to the lemony sharpness of an amaretto sour. It’s bittersweet perfection, balancing like a pro gondolier between cheek-sucking tartness and the sugar rush of almond liqueur with a syrupy maraschino cherry.
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We choose four pescatariancicchetti between us. Three fabulous squid croquettes are crunchy and rotund, smoky with paprika and dusted with parmesan. The calamari has been blended up into a smooth paste with what tastes like a bechamel sauce so the chewy texture of the tentacles is gone, replaced with a soft savoury pillow with mild kicks of chilli and strong blasts of garlic in the paprika aioli dip beside it.
The garlic theme continues in an oval-shaped mini pizzette drizzled with garlic oil. It’s ultra thin and crispy, with brittle edges that are browned and crunchy, but the bubbling mozzarella is divinely creamy with five or six slivers of roast pepper slices swirling out from the middle. The crispy zucchini flowers are not as crispy as they could be — the batter is thick, overpowering the delicate flavour of the orange blossoms. We can’t finish them. It’s not a memorable version of the traditional cucina povera dish but we move onto our bruschetta, licked with a thin smear of pistachio and feta spread topped with slices of grilled aubergine and frills of rocket leaves. Raw garlic is the first flavour that comes through and it seems to swallow up any woody and earthy notes from the pistachio — which I was looking forward to, bringing back holiday flashbacks of creamy scoops of nutty green ice cream.
We’ve got tickets to a show after lunch so we ask if we could have two slices of coconut passion fruit cheesecake and orange and polenta cake to go. After a few visits to the kitchen and some rummaging in a cupboard, our server can’t find any takeaway boxes. We let out a Bridge of Sighs about that: West Room meatballs and confit duck rigatoni are definitely available on UberEats and Deliveroo so I’m not sure what happened there.
Our server does have cardboard coffee cups though, so we improvise with a DIY affogato; a shot of espresso (poured more like a triple espresso instead which would have prompted a flailing of hands and torrent of criticism from real Italians; I used to work in Costa) and a ball of vanilla ice cream. The thrown together dessert is overcharged at £8 instead of the £5 on the menu — perhaps our most authentically Venice bit of the meal so far.
Maybe the Venice theme has been watered down (like the city itself) over the years: to be honest the West Room doesn’t really stand out from the city’s Spanish tapas bars or Greek mezze spots. That said, the drinks were deliziosi, the mini bites an improvement on the crisps and nuts you get in most Edinburgh bars, and for one happy hour or so I got to reminisce about Venice. For that, if nothing much else, it’s a grazie mille from me.The West Room, 3 Melville Place, Edinburgh EH3 7PR; thewestroom.co.uk
Food 7Service 7Atmosphere 7
Feta pistachio bruschetta, aubergine, rocket, £7Squid smoked paprika croquettes, £8Crispy zucchini flowers, £6Garlic oil, mozzarella, spinach, pepper pizzette, £9Vanilla ice cream, £6
2 pints Moretti, £13 1 Amaretto sour, £9.501 espresso, £2
10 per cent service charge, £6.05