Mussel Inn - Edinburgh

If there's one thing you can get the British hooked on, it's seafood, pun predictable. So up in Scotland, which can usually be relied upon to show us the way in quite a lot of things, they are surprisingly a bit behind the times on the fishy thing, which is extraordinary when you think they have so much of the stuff around them. Not only lots of it, but real quality as well.

But both the Edinburgh and Glasgow Mussel Inns are doing their best to make sure that Scotland catches up and tells the world that Scottish seafood is streets ahead of the rest.

In Rose Street to be precise, that well-loved Edinburgh thoroughfare that offers a parallel pedestrian alternative to much of Princes Street, is friendly and well-used, and has rather sadly tended to shake off its formerly slightly louche flavour. Unlike its sibling in Glasgow the Rose Street Mussel Inn has not won any awards, but the food is every bit as good.

Creamy seafood chowder and the soup of the day both come with fresh crusty bread, or there's crab, which comes with lemon and cherry tomato mayonnaise. The grilled platters give an option between starters or light meals, and oysters are either chilled natural, or grilled with a choice of cheese and bacon, or garlic butter. In my experience goat's cheese makes an excellent foil for seafood flavours, none more so than when wrapped in a pastry case and served with spiced onion marmalade, as here.

Plump, juicy King scallops are a weakness for many, and at Mussel you can have them char grilled, on a skewer, pan fried, or seared. Their small cousins, mussels, come in kilo pots, again with choices, this time natural, shallot, roasted pepper, leek, Moroccan or blue cheese, of which the Moroccan, with chillies garlic, ginger, coriander and cumin sounds highly toothsome. But I think I would have been diverted well before then by thoughts of the hot seafood platter with its mix of fish and assorted shellfish poached in garlic, shallot, and white wine and cream sauce.

Round off with a chocolate and almond torte with chocolate sauce, and then shuffle off into a dark corner to rest until it's time to come back. The wine list is predictably mostly white, though with some concession to heathens who occasionally like to have some wiry red with their shellfish. Their Locret Lachaud Brut, from the same province as Dom Perignon lives up to its claim of being excellent taste and value.

The Scottish passion for deep-fried Mars Bars is well catalogued, but not available at the Mussels, where sticky date pudding with butterscotch sauce and ice cream may challenge the odds just as much, but do it with more grace.

Both Mussels are doing a first class job for their public and the cause of seafood in general. Any differences or preferences are purely personal and slight and do not affect the excellence of either.

For far more information - including their full menu - try a visit to their fun-packed Website, from which I was delighted to have authoritative evidence for what my instincts have been telling me ever since my first mussel, that seafood is seriously good for you.