Dulse Seafood & Wine (Edinburgh West End) — Restaurant in City of Edinburgh

Walking in from the street it displays a lovely bar and quite a few tables seating perhaps 20-25 people. This areas focus is an intimate wine and cocktail bar serving small sharing plates but ascend the staircase at the back and you find yourself in Dulse, the seafood restaurant. This space opens up into a gorgeous medium sized room that’s light and bright with large windows bringing as much of the skyline inside as possible and if you are lucky enough, you’ll get our seat with views right up to the Castle. The seaside decor is understated with pale wood, turquoise blue tones incorporated through glassware, the colour of the accent wall and picked up in the tablemats that are made from recycled plastic that has been recovered from our oceans. Shells, coral and general maritime objects fill spaces and corners, giving a very relaxed and welcoming vibe. When you’re not just staring out this window at the view and blue skies you’ll be tucking into some great seafood. The menu consists mostly of small plates to share with a section of five large main dishes. They also have a Day Boat Special with specials like Lemon Sole, Langoustines and Lobster. We decided to order small plates enabling us to try more of this fabulous menu. We started off with a colourful carousel of Cumbrae Oysters, 2 of each - natural, Cucumber and Jalapeno and Bloody Mary. The oysters were properly cleaned, loosened at the foot and none were milky. A fab start. I loved too that we were given proper two pronged oyster forks! The Trout Pastrami with rye bread and creme fraiche was beautiful and delicate. Melted like butter and I loved the contrast of textures when placed atop the rye bread. I just wish I had ordered this plate to myself. Lobster Crumpet with citrus brown butter. All the butter had soaked into the crumpet making it just ooze with goodness at every bite. This was a nice wee dish. I wanted it to be outrageously good but it was just nice. Nothing necessarily wrong with it, I just felt it could have done with a bit more punch! Half Shell Scallop - This dish was a beaut. You know my love affair with scallops, well this just took it to another level. Scallop dripping in Dulse de Paris Butter equals one very happy Adele. Although the scallop will always and forever sit atop my food pedestal, this was my favourite dish of the day. Scottish Creel Caught Langoustine Tails in a pumpkin and coconut soup. Oh my gosh this was superb - I really did want to lick the bowl clean! The sweet give of the langos against the smooth creamy delicious yumminess of the pumpkin. Gimme gimme gimme. This bowl of Singapore Style Mussels was so vibrant. The sauce was quite thick coating the mussels and getting into every nook and cranny of the shell and mussel. Tangy from the tomatoes and zingy with a hint of heat. Another great bowl of food. Not all the mussels had opened up and some shells still had barnacles on, but we discarded these. Another dish that was sunshine and happiness on a plate. Octopus, burnt tomato and citrus barley. The octopus was so beautifully cooked that if you were blindfolded you’d never have known that it was octopus you were eating. It was succulent, soft and meaty. The burnt tomato sauce was incredible. These Dulse seaweed potatoes are a must order. Dessert was Cheese of the Day with truffle honey madeleines and a Vanilla set cream with cherries, basil oli and brittle. The Cheese course was delicious. A large amount of cheese was served with what I claim is a stroke of genius, warmed through madeleines that had been dipped in truffle honey. Sweet foodie heaven above! The Set Cream dessert was very light and a nice way to end lunch. For me the basil oil was too overpowering though and I felt it really dulled the flavour of the cherries. Maybe less oil would be better. I still ate it though! Dulse is well worth a visit and if you are a Seafood lover, there is no way you are leaving disappointed. More on...

Below is my old review from 2022. Still a good seafood restaurant which I would recommend, although I have adjusted the rating as I find that the quality has gone down a notch, from the wonderful tin bread being replaced by a not so well made focaccia, to a certain heaviness and lack of finesse. Still, seafood was cooked very well and was of good quality, in dishes with interesting flavour combinations. Service is very sweet. Prices remain full. (2022) I have walked by this new restaurant a few times over the Summer, in the spot that used to belong to one of the Escargots, an Edinburgh stalwart, and was keen to try it. I'm very glad I did.

They source good seafood and they prepare it well, relatively simply but with immaculate technique, and with little imaginative twists and turns that make every dish interesting.

We loved the three small dishes we had before a larger one: a plump and moist octopus tentacle with burned tomato and citrus barley; a delicious and creamy Arbroath smokey tart with seaweed; and a classy raw scallop (Orkney), the thin slices tasting fresh and sweet and almost buttery, coming with umeboshi (i.e. pickled in the Japanese style) plum, elderflower and strawberry. How to elevate splendid raw produce with few elements that enhance, rather than compete with, it. Brilliant.

The main was a classic whole Lobster Thermidor, less cheesy than most I've had, and for this reason with the fantastic boozy fishy smoky sauce delivering a clearer impact. Needless to say, the lobster was cooked to perfection.

Portions are small. However, for a fiver you can have a whole loaf of rather special tin bread (with accompanying butter) that is quite filling: recommended. We also had a very well charred pointed cabbage. There were a couple of dessert options, including a tempting chocolate pave', but we skipped.

Prices are full, no two ways about it, but all in all commensurate to the quality, the location and the times. They follow the unwelcome new trend (in Edinburgh) of automatically adding a service charge (10%), thus depriving the customer of the pleasure of making this gesture him/herself. The wine list has some interesting choices and is not bad value for Edinburgh, with less crazy markups than average. Our service team featured a jolly and energetic manager taking orders and explaining the menu, and two professional young waiter and waitress. The atmosphere for this lunch was easygoing and quiet....

For the prices advertised, I seriously do not think it is worth it. I paid £150 to be extremely disappointed.....

We were here for a farewell dinner for my sister visiting from abroad, as she loves seafood. We saw on Instagram how popular it was, reviews were great online so naturally I thought to surprise her with what I thought was one of the best seafood places in town.

Things went so wrong and awkward for the whole experience, we are never coming back:

They did not bring us menus for the first 15 minutes of us arriving. They also failed to bring us side plates when they brought all the food. Since we saw on Instagram that part of the experience was to flip the food on the table and eat straight away like that, we thought that was the case. Imagine our embarrassment when our server saw us eating straight on the table, apologising and rushing to bring us side plates because the table was not prepared for us to be able to eat our food like that. People were looking, which made us feel extremely awkward and out of place for not knowing...

My sister got the 'boil' with my partner. They had half a crab in there that was absolutely inedible. No tools to crack the leg shells, and the meat was just impossible to reach. A lot of the mussels were closed off, so inedible as well.

For £32.5 per person they both ended up eating some crayfish, 1 sliced sausage, and lots and lots of potatoes. They actually had to bathe the potatoes in the oily sauces offered on the side, to be able to eat them...

I prefer simple fish (cod, hake, haddock) to other types of seafood, so I ordered a hake (£29), and to say I got the blandest piece of fish I've ever tasted is an understatement. It was tender and nicely cooked, but with all the ingredients (a herb mash type is sauce, basically) on the plate, just no flavour or taste whatsoever. The amount of food was also sub par as I got hungry an hour after I ate my dinner.

Overall a very awkward and embarrassing experience, staff ignored us when we tried to get their attention (to ask if we needed plates, trying to call for the bill took forever as well). Just not the way you want to be looked after, or fed, when you spend what for most people is an excruciating amount of money.......