The Tap Music Lounge — Restaurant in City of Edinburgh

This bar adjoins the hotel where my wife and I spent two nights at the weekend at the end of our two week tour of Ireland and Scotland. We were over from Canada looking at my family history.

We had some drinks in this bar on Saturday night and had a mixed experience. We were going to walk by but noticed they had a musician playing live music and we wanted to listen to it after a long day.

He was a great, Scottish performer with a wonderful voice and he played great acoustic covers of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, REM, and many others. He even sang a version of 'My Way' in Spanish which my wife was impressed with because she used to teach Spanish in a school!

I asked if him if he knew any John Prine but he didn't, sadly. However, I did ask him to play one of his own songs, which he did and it was as good as the covers he played. We didn't get his name before he left and there weren't any promotion posters up in the venue to say there was music on or who was playing which is a real shame because, if all the musicians are as good as this guy, they deserve promotion!

My top recommendation is that, If you are staying here at the weekend, check out the live music. It's really high quality. I don't usually leave reviews like this but wanted to give the musician some recognition since the bar didn't have any promotion materials up.

As for the bar itself, they only had one person serving and, when, we went up to order, we had to wait at least 10 minutes to be served. When we were served, the waiter was quite rude and impatient. They need more staff at the busy times of week and year, I think.

The drinks themselves were pleasant and went well with the excellent live music but were really overpriced. We went to a bar nearby afterwards and got the same drinks for cheaper, quicker and with nicer staff.

The food wasn't great, either. It tasted and looked like it had come out of a fat fryer. I would avoid it as it was overpriced, like the drinks.

In all, if you go by and see a musician playing, stop in and have a whiskey but...

There were about 5 customers total and 3 servers. Took 25 minutes to be served, then another 20 minutes after we were clearly finished our first round of drinks. Once they took our second order of 2 drinks we waited 30 minutes, never received them. The sever didn’t know what alcohol they had and there was no menu he could give us either. Went to pay for our first drinks, told it was table service only, so we would wait for someone to serve us (even though servers were standing around doing nothing). Finally paid, HOWEVER, they had charged us for the second drinks yet never gave them to us. Terrible behaviour, the bar was near empty and we could barely get service. Imagine if it were full. They need staff that will do their job instead of stand there talking...

Popped in when passing by after seeing a live music performer,both myself and my partner liked the look and feel of this place I asked for a stella and a gin and Tonic and left my cash with my partner to pay for the drinks while I took natures call,when I got back my partner had been told they dont accept cash only cards,and they had already poured the drinks I choose not to use a card when I go anywhere as it is too easy to overspend,the staff insisted there were signs up saying this...not on the entrance we used nor were we told anything while ordering so thank you for the embarrassment we wont be stepping foot...