Creelers Seafood Restaurant

Edinburgh, like much of Scotland, is blessed with fantastic seafood. The rugged coastline is home to many of the UK’s finest produce, from wild salmon and trout to huge scallops, mussels and bourgeois varieties of fish that crop up on the menus of London’s best restaurants. So with this in mind, I went for a meal at Creelers, a family-run seafood restaurant in the heart of the Old Town. Their website enthuses about their love of seafood and the finest of local produce, cooked simply and without fuss to show off the very best of the ingredients; how could I possibly resist a visit?

Situated in Hunter Square, just off South Bridge Borders where much of the Fringe Festival takes place, the restaurant is a humble and unpretentious affair, with wooden chairs and tables and the curiously plastic pot-plants that one seems to find everywhere in Edinburgh. The place is well staffed, mainly with students but ones who were friendly and efficient, as opposed to sulky and incompetent as you find in so many restaurants these days.

The menu is also a straightforward affair, which is by no means a bad thing. A starter of homemade fish soup with rouille and croutons was flavoursome and hearty, though it was made with a salmon base and personally I prefer the rich and intense shellfish stock that you would find in a traditional French fish soup. So why did I order it? Because I wasn’t listening to the waitress when she told us that it was made with salmon. Nevertheless, my partner was woman enough to swap dishes halfway through so that I could sample the rest of her moules mariniere, and boy was I glad that I did.

The moules mariniere at Creelers was the finest example of that dish that I’ve had in living memory, certainly the best that I’ve had in the UK. The mussels were huge, plump and juicy, and the sauce – oh the sauce – was divine. They hadn’t used too much cream but still managed to produce a velvety texture, rich with wine and seasoning, lifted by parsley and so tasty that one could’ve eaten it with a spoon. The dish was served with chunks of crusty bread that was used to mop up the last remnants of the sauce and the remaining mussels that had slipped from their shells and lay marinating in the bottom of the bowl like glistening jewels of the sea. In fact the dish was so good that I considered cancelling my main course and ordering the starter again.

Main courses of halibut on a bed of mash and a plate of seared scallops were no less accomplished. The fish was meaty and the mash delightfully rich; the scallops were among the best we’d eaten, being plump and perfectly cooked. A fairly priced and well chosen wine list complimented the food, and although the dishes were what you might call London prices (£7.50 for the mussels, £17.75 for the halibut), they were worth every penny.

If you are visiting Edinburgh or indeed live there, you really must drop into Creelers for a meal, if only to sample their moules mariniere (in fact you would be a heathen to visit this place without ordering that dish). We were too stuffed for pudding but I imagine those are pretty good too.

Creelers, 3 Hunter Square, Edinburgh EH1 1QW. Tel. 0131 220 4447.