And so, there was another. The Michelin restaurant gods have smiled benignly upon Edinburgh and doled out more stars. We now boast seven one-starred restaurants. A further five are recognised with the lesser Bib Gourmand. That is an impressive haul and recognition of the consistent escalation of the city food scene. Boundaries are being pushed, and it is happening right here.

Allow me to quibble with the Michelin ratings a little: Lyla must know that two stars is in near reach, Cardinal should feel hard done by, and The Kitchin must surely be trading on reputation and a proprietor’s helpful name as much as anything that comes over the pass these days.

That said, the whole point of a new Michelin guide is to stir up a little controversy and generally get people like me muttering darkly in a corner. After all, one person’s burnt tangerine financier with a mustard sorbet is another person’s ideal canape.

The place stirring up the most interest, reader, is Avery. It’s not every day that a chef from San Francisco pack his much-lauded restaurant – pots, pans, plates and glasses all – into a shipping container and moves to St Stephen Street. In fact, I am prepared to wager a lot of cash (the set menu, for example) that this hasn’t happened before. It is a culinary and Stockbridge first, and neither cuisine, not Stockbridge, has many firsts.

Chef Rodney Wages hails from Kansas, but it doesn’t seem that we are in Kansas anymore, Toto. His resume glitters with the greatest Californian restaurants: a stint at the French Laundry, time at Benu, overseeing the pass at Atelier Crenn. (These are the best restaurants in the world, west of Picardy Place.) His own pop-up quickly found feet in the opening of his first restaurant, also called Avery, in the heart of San Francisco’s Japantown. The Asian influence on his cooking shows.

He is a cheery sort of chap, willingly decapitating bottles of champagne with a sabre outside his New Town cellar. (Again, a first, at least since Henry Dundas was roaming down an unnamed hill nearby.) Despite recently welcoming a new baby, he is very much ‘hands on’ in his tiny, loudly decorated restaurant.

The night we were there, he had been up since 4am and was very much on top of things nearly twenty hours later. This is a chef at the coal face, working incredibly hard to deliver something exceptional. That, he is managing.

It’s easier to get a table than you might think. Almost all the other diners on our night were Americans in town, who gauchely confuse dinner time with the late afternoon. Five pm being apparently late, a second and more civilised sitting at 7.30 becomes available.

The menu, despite being scrawled with a sharpie pen, shows real class from start to finish. This is a man who can cook at the highest levels and my sense is that he is only just getting started in this town. Ingredients are consistently in peak condition, and they are impeccably flavoured. He doesn’t just serve luxury ingredients. He cooks with them. Other restaurants should take note.

The opening caviar, for example, is served on a smoked cream with grilled anchovies. The roe is there to add taste and mouthfeel, not just to look expensive on a plate.

This focus on flavour over bling elevates beetroot into the same exalted category. It is grilled for an age and carefully rolled into an origami rose, sitting proud atop the finest burnt sesame tartlet, all sprinkled with some very magical onion ash. This is exciting, exhilarating. Cook, baby, cook!

Courses are served with a touch of drama. This is a Good Thing. You are paying a lot of money here, and you want a bit of fuss. Fresh-as-can-be langoustine is gently grilled, shelled and served with fermented pineapple and chili on the most enormous crimson glass dish, over a foot wide. Aebleskiver, the iconic sweet Danish batter ball, came out all savoury with brassicas and roasted garlic. BBQ eel came served on a shiso leaf with a glistening sliver of pork fat: I curled it into a taco and swooned. I’ll remember these three dishes for a very long time.

As the menu developed, it struck a more serious note, but teased us still, veering between plates of simplicity and plates of the posh stuff. One of the best larger dishes was tortellini in brodo: filled pasta in broth, as I believe the Italians call it. This is a dish of great simplicity, but takes skill and confidence to execute so perfectly.

Quickly there followed a wild bird – pigeon, I think – made as a small wellington, topped with truffle and bottomed with two rich sauces: a vadouvan reduction, and a cream sabayon. Delivering dual sauces, getting both to perfection at exactly the same time, is a harder trick for a kitchen than it seems. It is the kind of skill that impresses a Michelin guide. Then we are back on the more simple side: two tiny cuts of perfectly pink deer, with a farce on the side. Heaven.

A cheddar cheese tart with honeycomb led into dessert. Dessert was the only dish that failed: the custard was far too large, and the woodruff flavour added little. It reinforces my view that however wonderful a chef is, being a wonderful pastry chef is a different beast, just as brilliant food reviewers don’t necessarily make noted equestrians. They operate in different worlds.

Drinking by the glass is expensive. The prices are vague and have an air of being high. It is the kind of place that offers to find an open bottle and pour a glass of something special for an unspecified fee. We chose to drink by the bottle. Us Scots like to know what we are paying, what we are getting for it, and whether we are being diddled. The truth is, no-one is being diddled at Avery. It is an expensive restaurant, but is operating at very high levels, with a small staff, and can clearly go further.

In other Foodie news, the chocolate shop on Maritime Street has sadly – if not unsurprisingly – closed down. We hear interesting things about Barry Fish now occupying half of Mimi’s, and will be off to get the skinny on it soon. ■

Value

7/10

Experience

9/10