Norn

Norn

We are fiercely focused on sourcing all our produce from suppliers and growers who are sustainable, ethical and passionate about their ingredients.

Our menu will change regularly as the produce used will be what our suppliers tell us is at its best and ready to use at that moment.

This will be presented through a fixed menu of four or seven courses with matching drinks as an option.

http://www.nornrestaurant.com

Norn Restaurant

We are fiercely focused on sourcing all our produce from suppliers and growers who are sustainable, ethical and passionate about their ingredients.

Our menu will change regularly as the produce used will be what our suppliers tell us is at its best and ready to use at that moment.

This will be presented through a fixed menu of four or seven courses with matching drinks as an option.

Norn restaurant, Edinburgh - Review - Decanter

There are three different purées with the seared cauliflower and hazelnuts.

Turns out it’s cauliflower and pear, shallot and parsley.

Norn (the ancient Celtic language) is the hottest ticket in Edinburgh.

Served with aged homemade butter, it may just be the best bread I’ve eaten and makes us relieved we’ve ordered the four-course menu rather than six.

An appley Binner, Le Salon des Bains Riesling 2015 is spot on with the cauliflower, and the bright, amphora- aged Cos, Pithos Rosso 2015 (a Nero d’Avola-Frappato blend) cuts through the richness of the lamb perfectly.

Norn Restaurant Review - Hidden Edinburgh

Norn combines incredibly creative dishes with natural wine and adds an element of theatre and food education to produce an extremely polished and quite frankly amazing evening out.

Norn is not about turning tables quickly and getting customers in and out, the menu takes the form of either a four course tasting menu (£40) or a seven course tasting menu (£65).

And if it is any test to the quality of the wines, I had the matching seven glasses of wine to the tasting menu and woke up with no hangover… So where do I start with the food, it really was incredible – the whole process is perfect, each dish is brought out to your table, ingredients are carefully explained along with cooking techniques and the passion and enthusiasm from the chefs towards their food shines thought as they explain the dish to you.

Wines have been chosen to specifically match the dish so I do urge you to complete the experience by having matching wines to food, but the option choose a bottle is also available.

We ate the 7 course tasting menu with matching wines priced at £65 for food and £60 for matching wine per person, I cannot recommend Norn highly enough and I can see another Michelin Star restaurantjoining the ranks in Edinburgh soon!

Norn, Edinburgh, restaurant review - Scotsman Food and Drink

So far, I’ve had to rotate a keyboard in Every Brilliant Thing at Summerhall, I was made a magician’s assistant in order to be humiliated in another show, and one comedian made a comment on my clapping style – “like a Morningside lady”, apparently.

Each course is brought out reverently by one of the four young chefs.

In no particular order, our courses included my favourite – “sea trout, beetroot, orache, raspberry” – with crispy shards of salty fish skin, a soft fillet the colour of Barbie’s skin, leaves of apple flavoured orache, strips of chioggia beetroot, like tiny football scarves, and bits of raspberry.

According to the trendily be-spectacled chef who delivered “bramble, sea buckthorn, meadowsweet, sourdough”, it featured forced berries from his neighbour in Dunbar.

This was probably the most challengingly alien tasting of all the courses (like licking the inside of the toaster, in parts), though still moreish.

Norn, Edinburgh, Scotland: Restaurant Review - olive magazine

Dining at Norn (in the site of the old Plumed Horse) is, put simply, an incredible experience; it’s a few hours of your life that you will savour for a long time.

It has definite edge – The Rolling Stones are playing on the jukebox, front of house has cool moss linen aprons, and you’ll get a visit from each of the chefs in the kitchen over the course of your meal.

Norn is all about fixed tasting menus; you have the option of four (£40) or seven (£65) courses at dinner, and any dietary requirements can be catered for if notified in advance.

Dessert number two was strawberry, almond, chocolate and water mint – a light ending to the Norn experience.

Organic, biodynamic, traditionally made natural wines make up 95% of the drinks menu at Norn.

Norn, Leith, Edinburgh: 'It makes me want to gasp OMG OMG, like a ...

There’s a moment when you realise you’re in the hands of a special talent: at Norn, that moment arrives with the butter.

Small and insignificant in the scheme of a seven-course tasting menu (eight with the unannounced extra of a tartare of ripe, fruity tomato dressed with oil, chive flowers, salty little capers, lovage and croutons), it sets the tone for an extraordinary meal.

Norn (not, apparently, the result of trying to say “northern” after a few drams) is an austere little restaurant in shades of chilly grey, the only punctuation the open kitchen and a lot of carpet (carpet!

But no matter what fish, fowl or foraged fungus turned up on the day, it would issue from Norn’s kitchen transformed into something ravishing, be that bread made with northern Scottish beremeal for a loaf of bewitching, raspy crust and dense crumb (with that butter, oh) or good old chicken breast magicked into a dish of many-layered wonders: pheasant back mushrooms like a weird collision between meat, melon and ‘shroom; shards of crisp skin; charred cavolo nero).

My favourite dish is Shetland black potato – rare, because it’s difficult to grow, and difficult to find, because of its colour – is baked until truffly, the dry flesh doused in butter, the dense skin almost porky; it cascades waves of sweet, white crabmeat, with buttermilk foaming on top and a pool of crowdie cheese beneath; plus black rapeseeds for texture and tiny petals of caramelised onion for a fleeting note of sweetness.