ARTICLES: BLACK BO'S, EDINBURGH

December 2005

© MARK FISHER published in The Herald

EATING OUT

THE BEST FOR A VEGETARIAN CHRISTMAS

BLACK BO'S

57-61 Blackfriars Street, Edinburgh

0131 557 6136

Style: Laid-back casual

Food: Imaginative veggie

Christmas dinner: £16 for two courses

Wheelchair access: No

CULNIARY COMEDY. There's simply not enough of it. When was the last time you laughed at your lettuce or chortled over your chopsticks? It doesn't happen. Food's no fun any more.

Culinary comedy at Christmas is even rarer. But here on the festive menu at Black Bo's is a haggis pudding stuffed with sweet potato and goats cheese. It sounds like an intriguing starter - as indeed they all do at this most inventive of restaurants - but you have to see it to get the joke.

The dark, crunchy haggis arrives at the table moulded into the shape of a Christmas pudding. There are no flames but, crowned with half a cherry tomato and a flourish of dill, it's almost as spectacular. Discovering the mixture of sweet potato and cheese beneath the imposing exterior is a treat like finding a silver sixpence.

Such wit is symptomatic of the intelligence and creativity which is the hallmark of this unassuming restaurant, tucked away down a sleepy road off Edinburgh's High Street, and too long the best kept secret of veggie connoisseurs.

It demonstrates too that a veggie Christmas needn't mean an apologetic meat-and-two-veg without the meat, but can be an arresting and entertaining end in itself. Black Bo's does include two dishes for carnivores on its Christmas menu - trout baked in pears and almonds, and roast duck breast with red onions and cherries - but even the most determined flesh-eater will find it hard to resist at least one of the meat-free main courses here.

This is especially so when imagination is a rare commodity at Christmas. For the average chef faced with large parties of festive merry-makers, many of whom will be too tipsy or too chatty to pay any attention to the food, the easiest option is to fall back on the failsafe turkey, roast potatoes and sprouts.

That does the job in a boring kind of way, but it's no match for a baked banana stuffed with chickpeas, chillies and coriander, then flambéed with kahlua. The collision between the sweetness of the fruit and the heat of the spices is thrilling. The three of us agreed we could live on this one dish for a very long time. And it's only a starter.

Putting the menu to the test a couple of weeks before the Christmas season meant we hadn't been drinking since lunchtime and could give it our full attention - which didn't stop us polishing off a couple of bottles of a light and fruity dA Pinot Noir (£16.95). That happens easily at Black Bo's. It's a small, casual restaurant, with a soundtrack of tuneful indie-pop, its plain wooden tables and cloudy blue walls illuminated by low lights and candles. Once you've settled in you're not minded to leave in a hurry - particularly if, like us, you get to sit in the little four-seat alcove.

It's not as classy or well decorated as the nearby David Bann vegetarian restaurant and not as straight-forward as the wholesome veggie fare of Henderson's, but it gets my vote for inventiveness and lack of pretension every time.

So to the main courses, all of which had the kind of pizzazz you want for a special Christmas meal. We enjoyed the rich flavours of a pistachio and spinach roulade; an incredibly light and pleasingly alcoholic filo pastry filled with potato and leek; and the unusual textures of four Christmas balls stuffed with feta, tomato and basil.

We finished with the run of their puddings and were arguing over whether the cherry cheesecake was better than the coffee and coconut tart, when the waitress came over and put her vote in for the pecan and dark chocolate fudge brownie. I think we were all right. The prune and amaretto frangipani tart was pretty good too.

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