I was SO READY to love Frizzante, but I left disappointed in almost every way.
Italian food is my absolute favourite, but I'm not snobby about it. Give me a semi-comfortable atmosphere, a large glass of quaffable plonk and a plate full of that cheesy, creamy goodness and I'm as happy as a pig in proverbial. I am not hard to please! But Frizzante fell short of my very modest standards.
The first thing you may notice in Frizzante is that there's no obvious spot to wait at the entrance. It's very narrow, with the open kitchen immediately to your right. My wife and I hovered awkwardly by the door for some minutes, unsure what to do. The kitchen staff were frenetically plating up, not looking at us. If we had proceeded further inside, we would have been standing uncomfortably close to people trying to eat. We caught the eye of at least three different waiters several times, who saw us standing there and then roundly ignored us. Not even a "I'll be with you in a minute" or anything.
After three or four maddening minutes, a gentleman showed us to our table. Walking through the dining room you notice that it's VERY cramped inside. It's not a big restaurant and they have really packed the tables and seats in there. We were basically pushing past people to make our way through the room and my wife had to hand me her bag to fit by the table adjacent to ours otherwise she would have sent their wine flying.
The atmosphere is about as warm and inviting as an operating theatre. The lights are bright, the decor is plane and characterless and the music is awful. There is a set of huge mirrors along one wall to try to make the room feel less claustrophobic, but it instead forces you to confront the grizzly image of yourself stuffing pasta into your mouth and removes any sense of cosiness that the dining room otherwise might have had.
We had been seated no longer than ten seconds when our waitress was already asking what we wanted to drink. I asked if we could look at the menu first, so she came back maybe 30 seconds later. We ordered a bottle of white wine, which came in a giant plastic 'ice' bucket that actually was full of water with no discernible ice and did nothing more functional than take up about 75% of the tiny table. We were then harried to order so quickly that I caved to the mounting social pressure, panicked and picked a random thing from the menu that I instantly regretted.
So anyway, the food was not bad. Not great, but fine. My randomly chosen order was gnocchi, which was very salty, somewhat small and a little 'meh' but I certainly ate it all. The missus had some veggie pasta, which tasted very acceptable but really nothing better than I would make at home with my extremely humble abilities.
With so many great Italian places in Edinburgh, I doubt I will be back to Frizzante. read more