A stone room six steps below St Stephen Street, with a long counter, twelve tables and a back room.
The room
Below thePavement
The basement was a cellar under a Georgian shop. Now it has sandstone walls, an oak counter down one side and the kitchen open at the back, so you can watch the board being cooked.
- at the counter, never booked
- 12
- at tables, two sittings a night
- 34
- in the back room
- 16
- lamps, on at sunset
- 19
The name
The man withThe ladder
A lamplighter went round the streets at dusk with a wick on a long pole and came back at dawn to put the lamps out with a hook on the same pole. On Heriot Row, Stevenson’s lamplighter was called Leerie.
The lamps there now are electric copies of the 1860s gas lamps, made in the early 1980s. Stevenson would have minded: in 1881 he wrote A Plea for Gas Lamps and called electric light “a lamp for a nightmare”. Ours are electric too, but they are warm filament bulbs on dimmers. We like to think he’d have let them off.
He was born in Edinburgh in 1850, at 8 Howard Place, the son of a lighthouse engineer. His grandfather and two uncles built lighthouses too: a family that kept lights going.
The people
Who’sBehind the counter
Floor and wine
Ailsa Baird
Runs the room and the list. Ask her for something like the last bottle you loved; she’ll find its cousin.
Kitchen
Fergus Marr
Cooks. The board is his and changes with what comes in: the boats, the market, the season.
Bar and Thursdays
Priya Kaur
Behind the counter most nights, and books the bands for the back room.
The back room
For eight toSixteen
One long table behind the kitchen, for birthdays, leaving drinks and suppers you plan with Fergus. Tell us the date and how many, and we’ll send a menu.
- Seats8 to 16, one table
- Set suppersfrom £38 a head
- Tue–Thu£250 minimum spend
- Fri–Sat£450 minimum spend
- Thursdaysthe band plays here