Edinburgh

Castlehill · The Royal Mile

The Witchery is completely insane. You enter beside Edinburgh Castle and immediately lose access to restraint: candlelight, carved oak, tapestries, heraldic ceilings, red leather, antique candlesticks, gothic staircases, tarot imagery, rooms with names like The Secret Garden. The Original Dining Room looks as though a minor Scottish noble has been expecting you since 1604 and is beginning to take the delay personally. James Thomson has spent decades assembling the place from actual historic fabric and additional layers of deliberate theatrical excess; even the oak panelling was rescued from a fire at St Giles'. The food follows the same register: haggis, red deer, steak tartare, lobster Thermidor, tournedos Rossini. Edinburgh has spent centuries becoming extraordinarily good at looking like Edinburgh, and The Witchery turns the dial until it nearly breaks. You are eating beside a castle.

Old Town / Waverley Arches · Arch 15, East Market Street

There is something reassuring about eating a large piece of beef underneath a railway. Chop House sits inside one of the brick arches beneath East Market Street, close enough to Waverley that the city above is still moving while dinner gets progressively darker, louder and more carnivorous below. Beef is dry-aged in-house for at least 35 days, butchered properly, then exposed to coals. There are oysters, bone-marrow butter, enormous cuts to share and cocktails clearly designed for people who have already accepted the evening may become expensive. The curved brick arch does almost all the decorating required. Edinburgh's Old Town can become overwhelmingly picturesque; Chop House is useful precisely because it feels urban rather than enchanted. Trains pass overhead while porterhouse arrives below, and the two belong together.

The Balmoral · 1 Princes Street

The Balmoral clock famously runs fast so passengers do not miss their trains. Downstairs, Number One moves at the pace of a tasting menu. The room is deep red, polished and ceremonious. John Munro's kitchen takes Scottish produce into contemporary territory, and he also became the hotel's head beekeeper after installing a hive in 2024. A four-AA-Rosette dining room underneath a giant railway clock now has a chef responsible for bees. That is useful information. Order dinner after the train has left.

New Town · 49A Thistle Street

Dusit's menu has dishes called A Loving Couple, Lady in the Garden, Two Friends Meeting and Tiger Cry. The tiny Thistle Street restaurant has been combining Thai herbs, chillies and curries with Scottish produce since 2002, which means sirloin can disappear into a red curry, local seafood can acquire lemongrass and lime, and Edinburgh weather can be dealt with through coconut milk and violence. The room is compact, the tables are close and busy nights are noisy. The poetic dish names occasionally approach nonsense, but order them anyway. If something called Tiger Cry contains enough bird's-eye chilli to justify the tiger's distress, language has done its job.

Fourth floor, 33 Castle Street, Edinburgh EH2 3DN

Take the elevator. This matters because Edinburgh spends most of its time making you look up, at the Castle, Arthur's Seat, spires, cliffs, hills, stairs apparently designed by Presbyterians who distrusted comfortable calves. Chaophraya reverses the arrangement. From the fourth-floor rooftop, the Castle suddenly sits almost level with dinner while the city falls away toward the Firth of Forth in the other direction. There is a glass box, a terrace and enough panoramic exposure that ordering Thai food can occasionally become secondary to watching Edinburgh do its absurd topographical thing outside. Have curry. Have cocktails. Watch the weather move across the castle, because in Scotland even the atmosphere has programming. If it rains, the glass becomes useful. If the sun appears, stay outside.