Dogstar, Edinburgh: ‘A dead cert for Christmas number one’

As 2025 expels its last consumptive gasps, talk turns to the lowlights of another apocalyptic year and, because humanity needs a filament of tinsel to which we can ritualistically cling at such times, our personal best-ofs. For me, it’s best album (CMAT’s Euro-Country), best telly (Hacks season three) and the rather more niche category of best focaccia.

Focaccia, you see, is the sourdough of 2025. Go to any casual neighbourhood restaurant and, among the burnished gleam of gildas and globular gordal olives, you will find the house focaccia, ideally served warm, with a wodge of butter – whipped, cultured, smoked or Marmited. Always delicious because, well, it’s bread and butter, innit. Some things don’t change.

And so to the focaccia at Dogstar, a hot new Edinburgh opening swaggering into the year’s end like a dead cert for Christmas number one. My partner Claire and I are brought two fat slices soon after arriving at this hyped restaurant, risen, as such mythical beasts are, from the ashes of an extinct old boozer. The bread has been branded by the bars of a charcoal grill and exudes small whiffs of smoke and yeast-starters lovingly tended by intense young men. What’s this? Not butter but bagna càuda – an achingly now Piedmontese garlic and anchovy dip. This one’s of the ferociously punchy kind that, like a toe-curling memory, comes back on you for days. Proof that no matter how ubiquitous food trends get, when you meet them at their very best they’re unforgettable. Best focaccia of 2025? You bet.

Sweet relief, because my expectations were sky high. Dogstar is a major opening in the city. It’s on the edge of my own neighbourhood, Leith, frequently on lists of UK foodie destinations and, since the trams (finally) arrived, gentrifying at a brutal rate, as in it’s now home to three Michelin-starred restaurants. And no Leither has mentioned Trainspotting for more than a decade. And the artists et al who made it what it is can no longer afford to live here. Except me who, like a limpet clinging to the rocks at the old harbour’s mouth, washed up here 17 years ago and refuses to budge.

Meanwhile, Scotland’s capital is having its own moment, winning the title of Most Exciting Food Destination for 2025 (The Good Food Guide), gaining another two Michelin-starred restaurants (Lyla, Avery), and a proliferation of classy new mid-range places including Ardfern, Stockbridge Eating House, Moss, Nishiki and Montrose. Dogstar, you could say, is the culmination of this excess of casual cool. A collaboration (sorry, collab) between James Murray, Michelin-starred ex-head chef of Timberyard, a restaurant so beautiful even its loos look like an art installation, and Nauticus, a rare pitch-perfect pub, whose other bar, Panda & Sons, has just been named world number one in the Top 500 Bars list. This is a lot of cool with which to contend and such dangerously raised levels can result in a restaurant disappearing entirely up its own arse.

Claire and I pitch up on a Friday evening, at 5.30pm sharp, knackered and sans kids, which means that by 6pm we’re euphoric in the way only middle-aged parents set free in a buzzing restaurant can be: drunk on superlative cocktails and wine. Dogstar looks exactly as you would want it to – like the pub it once was but mildly titivated, with quaint half-curtains drawn across the windows. We’re seated by one such window, through which a slender stream of Arctic wind flows.

Don’t bother going on Dogstar’s minimalist website to swot up on the menu. It’s constantly changing, short, hyper-seasonal and ethically driven. And seafood focused with a revolving trio of lesser-spotted molluscs. Tonight’s? Cockles, surf clams and, for the traditionalists, mussels. Murray is a genius with a grill basket, which he perches over coals and fills with whatever shellfish his local suppliers – the peerless David Lowrie Fish Merchants – bring in that day. Our surf clams are infused with gentle smoke from a brief clatter in it, tumbled in a clingy sauce of sea laver – a red algae used to make Welsh laverbread – and sherry. Chewy, smoky, sweet, saline… impossible not to fall in love with.

But why not more plant-based dishes? Especially as the ones we eat are so good. The last of the year’s English tomatoes, petite and lime-green, with a dish of soft nuggets of Lanark Blue cheese rippled through ranch sauce. The tomatoes lie macerating in a zingy bath of oil and citrus. No spoon provided. Who cares? I drink it straight from the bowl. A thick glazed cup arrives, filled to the brim with hot, frothy garlic broth, which we pass back and forth. It’s like licking the forest floors of Perthshire on the last days of autumn before the morning frost kicks in. In a good way.

I haven’t come across Mylar prawns before, a special scrawled on an old advertising mirror while we watch, smacking our ranch-glossed lips. Small, sustainably fished, caught in the coldest months, we’re told they’re cooked live and are best eaten whole. They look like miniature langoustines and smell like the best holidays in southern Spain. We crunch on soft bodies and crisp legs and shells, though not heads because even restaurant critics have their limits. They’re the sweetest, most sensational prawns I’ve ever eaten, and I miss them very much

Next, monkfish liver, buttery to a foie gras extent, in a foaming lobster sauce in which shoals of croutons and capers swim to cut through the richness. We ask our server what happened to the rest of the fish. It was last night’s sharing dish. How brilliant to see such hearty, inventive cooking come out of an astringent zero-waste policy.

There are a couple of less-than-perfect notes struck. A sharing plate of skate, the meat parting from the wing bone in lush harpsichord-ish strings, is overly seasoned, and the accompanying ribbons of celeriac chewy to the point of taking a despairing amount of time to swallow. Desserts could be more inspired than a warm chocolate mousse – and mine is cold anyhow – and sticky toffee pudding. But, frankly, who wants soulless plates of perfection when you can have a restaurant as warm, bold, big-hearted, and ethically minded as Dogstar? So here it is. A late entry to my best new restaurants of 2025 and, as they said on TOTP in my day, straight in at number one.

Dogstar, 17 Portland Place, Edinburgh EH6 6LA (dogstarleith.com). Sharing plates £8-£40, desserts from £9, wines from £32