Spoon

Spoon is a good option with a large group or an easy option if you can’t decide. In the few times I’ve been there, the service wand the food were OK, but for me it is fairly pricey and the food isn’t phenomenal. The food is very fresh, but nothing exciting. It is a good spot for dessert though, and the space inside is nice, but for me this isn’t a place I will go unless invited by others.

Really great vibe, perfect for just sitting there and doing work or actually having a nice fun meal with someone. Been here a couple times & The food has always been great. Highly recommend the toffee pudding.

Had an amazing brunch here and it’s very quirky and cute inside! I had the mixed grill which was presented very nicely and there was sooooo much food! Haggis was great. Awesome loved it!

We came here for a work breakfast. I have been here before for dinner, and coffee and its been good, but nothing amazing to call me back.
There was 10 of us at the breakfast. The menu was slim… We had sent in our orders already. The co-​worker who organised it, had to go check with them when they said they didn’t know our orders! So after we ordered AGAIN… we sat around for a bit… which wasn’t too big a deal until the food finally came and EACH PERSON that had ordered waffles got them COLD! Cold hard waffles with recently defrosted blueberries. COLD berries. ARE YOU serious?! One of the ladies sent hers back and when it came out again cold! So she refused to eat it and they took it off the bill! I was so hungry I ate mine. It tasted ok but I won’t go back again. They were unhelpful and not friendly or apologetic at all! And we were NOT a demanding group!
Also not great soya milk bad after taste in their lattes.
Sorry spoons there are more then enough places to get coffee or food in this town that I don’t need to give you another try.

If you can be bothered to climb the stairs you’re in for a treat. Spacious eclectic mix of high, low tables with wrap around windows gives this place a real airy feel. Good hearty staples with the option of popping in mid evening for a bowl of homemade chips or tea and cake/​pudding. Especially good for group meets or when you need to take yourself away for an hour or two. Staff always friendly and helpful.

Thanks to Unilocal for helping us find this restaurant for a dinner near our hotel. This was the best meal I had during my short trip to Edinburgh.
The aubergine and red pepper soup was delicious, as was the butternut squash. There were several other items on the menu that looked great, and I wish we’d had a chance for more than one meal here.

I’m a lover of a full Scottish breakfast and Spoon’s hit the spot. Fresh ingredients and great service. Really welcoming and open environment. Great for a lunch date or a meeting amongst employees.

I’m glad Spoon is around. I think the best part is the layout. It’s a big space, and the tables are mismatched so its a good place to meet people as they can accommodate small or large groups easily, and there is an area with just couches for while you are waiting, or if you just want to go alone. (I don’t think they do food in that part.) The menu is small but varied with breakfasty things which are on the cheaper side, and lunch things which are a bit higher, but not ridiculous for what they are. Also, you have to know you’re paying a bit extra on everything for the place. The tea isn’t great, I’ve gotten English Breakfast and Earl Grey, and both were lacking. Also got a flat white which was smaller than usual and quite bitter.
Food is good, space is good, prices & drinks are average.

Yep. I don’t like this place.
I’ve been a few times, and it’s always sat a bit funny with me, and I think I’ve realised why.
Let’s look at the setting first. They’ve gone for a kinda found art kinda vibe. Somewhere between kitschy and rustic. Not something I have a problem with per say, but it’s kinda cold. Both in temperature and feel. Their multitude of low wattage energy saver bulbs makes for awful light quality, and it’s quite harsh to have staring at you. Not only that but a lot of the staff seem quite cold to me too. We had one nice waitress, but the guy I recognised from before and the hipster bar dude we’re both aloof at best.
Then we have the food. Quite simply, I’m better than whoever they have. If I’m going out for a meal, I want food that impresses me, that ignites my senses. I’m just so utterly underwhelmed by the place every time I’m here. It all sounds nice on the menu, but they just don’t seem able to walk the walk.

Lovely quirky café. You come in up the stairs and are seated either on the big leather sofas or at a table. All the furniture is mismatched in a stylish way, the décor is vintage and quirky.
I had a blt sandwich which hit the spot and a flat white that was served in old school coffee cups.
Serving could be a bit faster, but it was a very busy day. Their selection of food is very good, something for everyone.
They’re one of the few coffeeshops that also serve beer, which is nice if half of your company would rather go to a pub for lunch.
Would definately recommend.

We noticed Spoon from the street when we were visiting Edinburgh. It was Burns night and it looked busy and fun and they had nice Art Deco windows and old lampshades. We came the next day and had the chicken and clapshot and the celeriac, potato and parsnip gratin. I admit I was a bit underwhelmed when I saw the menu (and the lack of meat options) but the food was so delicious I’ll happily eat my words. The savoy and red cabbage the gratin was served on was crunchy and buttery and although the gratin looked small it was really satisfying and the rustic menu felt wholesome in a non-​holy way. The décor is fun, higgledy piggledy charity shop chic — if you’re lucky enough to find a charity shop full of Ercol :)

Spoon’s menu has appealed to me for a while and before a trip to the Festival theatre, it made for a perfect pre-​theatre venue.
Inside is a bright, airy, comfortable and warming interior. It’s the right side of quirky and kitsch with retro, mis-​matched furniture and décor.
The menu is varied, with daily changing specials and plenty options for those with dietary requirements. A lot of places lay claim to their ‘fresh and seasonal’ ingredients without delivering a quality end product. Not at Spoon. They make incredibly tasty and inventive food. Delicious, hearty, full of flavour and very satisfying.
Contrary to some previous criticism, I found the staff to be friendly, attentive and very helpful when it came to questions about the menu. Service was timely and efficient, no complaints at all.
Spoon is definitely getting added to the list of ‘go-​to’ places in the area.

Perfect place to hang out with friends and have a tea or coffee. Really nice atmosphere! We got mint and orange tea and coffee. It was great!

I like a quirky café as much as the next person*, but for me Spoon doesn’t quite pull it off. It does a nice line in irregular chairs and tables, stuff hanging from the ceiling and art on the walls, but was a little too close to cafeteria territory for comfort.
*This isn’t true. Cafés aren’t my natural environment to be fair, though I’ve visited a few with other people in the past.
Some haikus:
The staff at Spoon were…
Attentive up to a point
Then gone for a while
Then the food — oh yes!
But it took a while really
Could have been hotter
Spoon was a good location for a Unilocal Brunchy-​Munchy, but no one wanted to stick around to luxuriate in their surroundings once the bill was paid.

I like Spoon, I do, but I should point out that my 4 star rating is based on the culmination of my visits thus far. If it were to be based on my most recent visit it’d be a 3.
Spoon has a lovely vintage atmosphere and décor (though it used to be much more eclectic, with vintage print and ads plastered on the columns), and it’s a really big space. I’d hedge a bet and say it’s too big for the kitchen, as food tends to take quite a while to arrive, even when it’s not busy (but of course it can be nowhere near full yet still be seating a fair number of people!).
Mostly recently I attended for Unilocal’s Brunchy Munchy, but alas as we’d visited on a Saturday we had to make do with the breakfast menu rather than the brunch menu (only available on a Sunday, boo). I ordered the porridge, which was nice enough, though I was glad to still have some milk left in my jug from my pot of tea as otherwise it would have been a bit much and a bit solid. It was a fairly reasonable £3.50 for a bowl of porridge with a dollop of jam in the middle (I’d have liked a bit more jam, mind), but I’d waited an hour for it to arrive (yes, an hour for porridge), so I was pretty famished by the time it arrived and it felt wholly inappropriate as it was now decidedly lunch time rather than breakfast.
In the past though, I’ve tried a variety of dishes from lunch and dinner. Nothing is complicated, it’s all competent to slightly fancy home cooking in style, but it’s all delicious and flavourful. The set menu is a good deal, though limited in option, and there’s always a variety of specials on offer (watch out for who writes this up though, I once had to go right up to the board to read it — the waiter who had written it admitted his handwriting is illegible — not helpful!).
Spoon is handily located for the Festival Theatre, and as it opened when I was studying over the road at Old College, I used to pop by for soup and a sandwich occasionally to break up library sessions. It’s also easily one of the best options in the area for food. Spoon misses out on that elusive 5^th star I’m afraid, but on the whole it’s very good.

I was unprepared for the vastness of Spoon. From the outside, it appears to be little more than a teaspoon, but once you’ve squeezed through the entrance and trotted up the wooden stairs, you emerge into a veritable serving spoon of a space; light, airy, and dotted with white muslin curtains, Spoon is a spacious joy.
Our table of ten, over to one side, included a nice squidgy pew along one of the walls, and nearby was a snuggling of Chesterfield armchairs (yes, that’s totally the collective noun) in which I could imagine whiling away hours on end over a hot chocolate and a book. In terms of the place itself, no question, five stars.
It’s a shame, then, that on this occasion the service was something of a letdown; we waited twenty minutes for our orders to be taken and a further hour for our food to arrive, though it was far from busy, and not a word was said on the delay. And once it had, nobody returned to check on us although I’d have loved another orange juice and was wedged between Unilocaly pals on the squidgy pew so getting out was tricky.
I’d ordered the muesli and yoghurt. Perhaps I was imagining something a little more constructed, but what arrived was precisely that — a vast bowl of muesli with a slightly carelessly-​shaped flurp of yoghurt across the top. It was very yummy, but the muesli to yoghurt ratio was large; more a case of too much muesli than too little yoghurt, and I ended up taking Jenna L’s unused milk jug from her tea to moisten the remaining mêlée.
A trip to the toilets was a fun treat, though, decorated as they are with cuttings from old beauty magazines, all of them the print version of «keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved», which is highly entertaining reading while one carries out ones functions.
In short, I adored Spoon and really want to give it a better rating. I’m not sure what was up — at one point we were laughing because every single member of staff appeared to have vanished — but I fully intend to return here and give it another go. It HAS to be as good as it could be.
I’m not usually apologetic over a three star review, because it’s a good rating — «A-​OK» is fine by me — but would break my heart if «A-​OK» were truly representative of somewhere that ought to be such a delight.

Spoon is one of those places that I tend to forget about when I’m in this part of Edinburgh (which is quite often); perhaps because its first-​floor location is accessed via a very unassuming staircase off Nicholson Street that is easy to walk past.
However, it really is deserving of more attention as the food is really rather good and definitely sets this place way above other eateries in the vicinity (did you see what I did there?).
The décor seems like it’s trying to create a vibe that’s somewhere between a 60’s kitchen and living room, being an eclectic mix of 60’s furniture, mis-​matched tables and chairs, standard lamps and those wire coatstands with plastic ends. It’s errr… shall we say funky?
Spoon’s pre-​theatre menu is excellent value for money, with 3 courses setting you back a mere £16. Choices are well thought out, and there is always a veggie and a gluten-​free option available. We both had the sea bream on Asian coleslaw with peanuts, chilli and coriander and the fish was just perfectly grilled. I preceded this with a starter of root vegetable and brown lentil soup that I could almost have stood the spoon up in, and topped it off with a dark chocolate pot with pear and shortbread.
Herself, who was nursing an incipient cold, was very impressed with a hot ‘winter warmer’ cocktail that involved mulched ginger, chillies, cloves and rum. This lifted her spirits so much that she was forced to order a second, whilst I made do with a glass or two of Pino Grigio.
The service was a little relaxed as we waited almost an hour for the main course to arrive, but to be fair they were very busy with the pre-​theatre crowd and it was certainly worth the wait for the sea bream. Lovely.

I cant really make a rank of the café between these around the George Square. Spoon, Brew Lab, Peter’s Yard and even the starbucks next to the sainsbury are all my first choice.
Spoon have two areas, one for drinking and casual talk, another one for food. i tried the food once, which is nice but still not good price for a student lunch. but i go to Spoon to meet friends and have drinks often, and sometimes order a piece of cake. the cakes of Spoon must be mentioned because they have different selections each time you went to. so that means their cakes are fresh made everyday.
The drinks are lovely, especially the hot chocolate, which is made from the real dark chocolate. You can tell it from the taste.
i love the inside decoration of spoon so much. i love every detailed stuff of it. :)
definitely a good choice for meeting friends or just stay there alone yourself.

This is what I want my house to look like.
Y’know, when I grow up. I love the mismatched furniture, the map covered tables, the random curtain (what does that do?) and the odd bits of furniture that make this open space look a lot less like a canteen than it otherwise might.
Spoon Café Bistro is pretty nice place to grab some food, with a decent lunch time menu and some interesting specials. A main for lunch will set you back £8−11 but it’s more than soup and a sandwich so I’m happy. There’s also a good, reasonably priced tea selection, their lapsang souchong is well worth it at only £2.
On my recent visit I had mussels with chips and mayo. As a Dubliner and, more importantly, a Clontarfian I likes me some mussels! These were cooked in parsley, butter and onions which was really perfect. The chips were handcut and resembled wedges but not soggy, as I’ve seen so many times before!
I didn’t go for a dessert myself but did gaze longingly at my friends pear and polenta cake with marscapone.
I’m lamenting the lack of half stars as 3.5 would more accurately describe my feelings about the place. The service was easy, breezy beautiful but pretty slow, like, glacial. We were there for 2 hours and literally just nearly managed to fit in the dessert. We had to bring up the cash on the way out just to hurry ourselves along.
Other than that everything was perfect!

I’ve visited Spoon a few times during the day now, and I’ve decided I’m definitely a fan.
I like the quirky interior decorations, the mish mash of old school furniture and the whimsical paintings on the walls. Even a visit to the loos is fascinating, with old 1970s women’s adverts plastered on the toilet doors and walls proclaiming that a modern woman can look 40, so long as she doesn’t let the wrinkles show. What the?!
I had a lovely plate of lentil soup, served with a good helping of brown bread and butter on my latest visit. The soup was very tasty and I enjoyed every last drop. I shared a plate of home made chips, which were also very nice.
As for service, I was there with a few other people and we were very happy chatting away, so I didn’t notice the relaxed (some say SLOW) service from staff. They were pleasant and friendly so all in all I’ve had several good experiences here. I’d happily recommend.

Definitely a place you should go to whilst visiting Edinburgh! Such a relaxing atmosphere there. Can fully subcribe to the views already posted here!