Restaurant at The Bonham Hotel

The Restaurant at Bonham aims to give stylish cooking amidst gracious surroundings and is certainly in the top ten restaurants in the city. You'll be tempted by distinctively European-inspired food and enticed by provocative wines. Start with a fillet of beef carpaccio with a potato salad, winter black truffle and extra virgin olive oil. Fish is rarely so good as in Scotland and my preference would be for the pave of halibut poached in cabernet sauvignon, parsnip and nutmeg puree and a salmon gravadlax sauce.

You might need to be dragged kicking and screaming from a selection of Iain Mellis cheese but once done would gracefully succumb to the rhubarb and lime cheesecake with Earl Grey crème anglaise and rosemary tuile. The wine list is not over long but there are some quite special items, with eight by the glass starting at £3.50.

'It isn't easy to blend modern furnishings with Victorian Interiors, but the visual tug-of-war works at its best in the Bonham's restaurant, with its airy height, stripped floor and cool colours. Lunch is carefully priced - two courses for £12.50, three for £15 - cheap enough to lure one away from the city centre, but not so cheap that the chef is inhibited. Which, with options of rib eye steak, tiger prawns and red mullet, is clearly not the case.' (Gillian Glover, 13th September 2003, Scotsman Magazine.)