Edinburgh Food Studio

Edinburgh Food Studio

Edinburgh Food Studio is a restaurant and food research hub. Our focus is on guest chefs, real skills, and quality ingredients.

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http://www.edinburghfoodstudio.com

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Beyond the buzzwords: Edinburgh Food Studio - Sustainable Food ...

Review analysis
food   staff   value  

The Edinburgh Food Studio is attempting to reinvigorate the past, share ideas in the present and pave the way to an exciting future for Scottish gastronomy.

Ben reflects: Setting up a restaurant could limit time and funding for research, with terms such as ‘organic’ and ‘sustainable’ functioning only to attract a mass consumer demographic or funding source, rather than actually reflecting the diverse realities of local people, ecologies and food cultures.

The caveats of choosing a single business model led to the evolution of the Edinburgh Food Studio, where a restaurant and communal dining are combined with workshops, consultancy and a research space.

Ben hopes that access to such networks and learning will encourage the replication of social and sustainable practice in everyday Scottish food culture.

The Edinburgh Food Studio blends the two, researching the ‘living traditions’ still relished in small pockets of Scottish culture today, and reinvigorating these with the help of modern equipment and techniques and contemporary interpretations.

Edinburgh Food Studio Pop-Up - Abergavenny Food Festival

Review analysis
menu   food  

We are delighted to welcome chefs Ben Reade and Sashana Souza Zanella from the crowdfunded restaurant and food research hub, Edinburgh Food Studio.

The team who met at Slow Food’s University of Gastronomic Sciences and come from Noma’s eponymous Nordic Food Lab will be creating a delicious feast of foraged and fermented ingredients.

Expect a five-course tasting menu to evolve alongside the inspiration, experiments and ingredients of the season.

Guests are welcome from 7:00pm, dinner is served at 7:30pm, 5 courses costs £55 with a drinks pairing for an additional £15, plus booking fee.

Dinner will be a fixed course menu, if you have any dietary requirements please let us know in advance.

Edinburgh Food Studio Keeps Food Interesting | Edinburgh Foody

Review analysis
food   value  

One of a series of special events where suppliers and/or chefs are invited to introduce guests to their food or cuisine.

In Northern Norway, far into the Arctic Circle he collects rare sea urchins and ancient mahogany clams.

Roderick was in and out of the kitchen that night, telling us about the incredible seafood and his life in North Norway.

Rice pudding with butter and cinnamon and very little sweetness.

All I can suggest is to hurry and book for one of Edinburgh Food Studio’s suppers or one of the events coming up.

Restaurant: Joanna Blythman reviews Edinburgh Food Studio ...

Review analysis
food   staff   drinks   menu  

So our packed-out dinner turns out to be a collaboration with two guest Hungarian chefs, Petra Tischler and Csilla Sybestyen, a set menu with Hungarian wines paired to each course.

Tischler talks us through the menu; Reade reminds us of the studio’s mission statement: keep food and drink interesting.

Then there’s salty goose crackling that Tischler brought over from Hungary, the most exquisitely fatty, crisp imaginable, with crunchy rose-pink fermented pickle (some type of radish, I think), and dabs of creamy, sinus-clearing horseradish sauce.

This is a collaborative dinner, so we can’t separate out the studio’s cooking from the guest chefs’.

However I sense Reade and Souza Zanella expressing themselves in the integrity and zeal with which they source their ingredients, the lengths they go to in preparing foods from scratch, their commitment to tracking down anything diverse, arcane, or overlooked, providing it’s edible.

Restaurant: Joanna Blythman reviews Edinburgh Food Studio ...

Review analysis
food   staff   drinks   menu  

So our packed-out dinner turns out to be a collaboration with two guest Hungarian chefs, Petra Tischler and Csilla Sybestyen, a set menu with Hungarian wines paired to each course.

Tischler talks us through the menu; Reade reminds us of the studio’s mission statement: keep food and drink interesting.

Then there’s salty goose crackling that Tischler brought over from Hungary, the most exquisitely fatty, crisp imaginable, with crunchy rose-pink fermented pickle (some type of radish, I think), and dabs of creamy, sinus-clearing horseradish sauce.

This is a collaborative dinner, so we can’t separate out the studio’s cooking from the guest chefs’.

However I sense Reade and Souza Zanella expressing themselves in the integrity and zeal with which they source their ingredients, the lengths they go to in preparing foods from scratch, their commitment to tracking down anything diverse, arcane, or overlooked, providing it’s edible.

Edinburgh Food Studio, a crowd-funding success story and the ...

Review analysis
food   busyness   menu   staff  

On a damp January evening, the diners who are bundling into the steamed-window warmth of the Edinburgh Food Studio have no idea what they are about to eat.

Set up by young chefs Ben Reade, who for three years was the head of research and development at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen, and his partner Sashana Souza Zanella, an anthropologist and chef from Montreal, it plays with our preconceptions.

Their focus on research is in line with a growing back-to-the-future trend in Scotland, looking to the country's food heritage, the traditional recipes and forgotten ingredients to create something refreshingly modern.

“I grew up eating a lot of traditional Hebridean food such as salt fish and meat,” he says.

His experimentation can be seen in the “Ceann Cropaig cracker, crab & rapeseed oil”, based on the classic island dish, Ceaan Cropaig: fish liver mixed with oatmeal cooked inside a cod's head.

Edinburgh Food Studio (158 Dalkeith Road, Edinburgh) | The List

Review analysis
staff   food  

Edinburgh-raised chef and food explorer Ben Reade and partner Sashana Souza Zanella, an anthropologist and chef, are creating the Edinburgh Food Studio as the centre of their journeys into cooking, eating, tasting, discovering and researching Scotland's food.

Reade was previously based in Copenhagen as head of Research & Development at the Nordic Food Lab, and was one half of the pop-up Scratch Series restaurant in Edinburgh in early 2015.

Both Reade and Zanella are graduates of the Slow Food inspired University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy.

You’ll need to book ahead at the Edinburgh Food Studio – a restaurant just three nights a week, but the food itself is gloriously spontaneous.

Then it’s down to the mood of owner-chefs Ben Reade and Sashana Souza Zanella, and whether there’s a Michelin-starred guest chef in the kitchen that week.

Edinburgh Food Studio, a crowd-funding success story and the ...

Review analysis
food   busyness   menu   staff  

On a damp January evening, the diners who are bundling into the steamed-window warmth of the Edinburgh Food Studio have no idea what they are about to eat.

Set up by young chefs Ben Reade, who for three years was the head of research and development at the Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen, and his partner Sashana Souza Zanella, an anthropologist and chef from Montreal, it plays with our preconceptions.

Their focus on research is in line with a growing back-to-the-future trend in Scotland, looking to the country's food heritage, the traditional recipes and forgotten ingredients to create something refreshingly modern.

“I grew up eating a lot of traditional Hebridean food such as salt fish and meat,” he says.

His experimentation can be seen in the “Ceann Cropaig cracker, crab & rapeseed oil”, based on the classic island dish, Ceaan Cropaig: fish liver mixed with oatmeal cooked inside a cod's head.

The Edinburgh Food Studio: Sashana Souza Zanella and Ben ...

Review analysis
staff   menu   food  

he raves – a wild food find now destined for the kitchen at the Edinburgh Food Studio, the restaurant and research hub he launched with partner Sashana Souza Zanella in November 2015.

The couple, both graduates of the prestigious University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont, came to Edinburgh, Ben’s home city, three years ago, with big plans to launch an ambitious open-source research project on Scottish food history and culture.

He pooh-poohs the notion, citing one-off dishes – there’s no such thing as a ‘signature’ dish here – including a foie gras torchon (courtesy of Iron Chef-winning Aussie, Tom Halpin) that introduced the first of the season’s Scottish asparagus, with cep oil, a little Madagascan voatsiperifery pepper (one of Ben’s favourite spices) and some Oaxen-inspired crisp fried nettles.

“So there you have a kind of like In De Wulf x Oaxen x Edinburgh Food Studio ‘collab’,” smiles Ben.

Ben and Sashana know it won’t last forever in its current fluid form, but they’re excited about what it might morph into and the role it will play in shaping Scotland’s food in the future.

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