I like his food. It makes me happy.

Jonathan (in the blue shirt) enjoying Fred’s food, and feeling happy.

Journalist Jonathan Trew writes…

For much of the last thirty years, I have had a series of jobs writing about food and reviewing restaurants for various Scottish media outlets. As a result, I'm often asked what is the best restaurant in Edinburgh. Irritatingly, my answer to that would depend on my interrogator's reasons for eating out.

By contrast, ask which restaurant I go to most often and the answer is always Fred's l’escargot bleu. I keep going back for the simplest and most convincing of reasons: I like his food. It makes me happy. At this weary stage of lockdown, just the thought of sitting in bleu with a G 'n' T in one paw and a menu in the other is an anticipatory pleasure to be savoured.

About now, it is worth acknowledging that I have done a few writing gigs for Fred in the past but I liked his food long before that. My first visit to bleu was in March 2009, shortly after they opened, then my first work for Fred was some seven years later in 2016. There must have been a good dozen visits in that period and there have been many more since. As I have mentioned, I like his food. It makes me happy.

Apart from it probably making you happy, I could bang on about the other reasons why you too should like his food. If you read his newsletters then you probably know them already. For the record, there is his dogged insistence on provenance; ethical sourcing and good husbandry. He champions Scottish produce. Fred is a stickler for seasonality. He detests supermarkets and their long, often unidentifiable food chains. He loves small scale artisan producers and will happily explain why. At length.

He walks the walk as much as he talks the talk. I know this is not just marketing woo woo because I have been with him on the cattle farm at dawn, in the freezing butchery hall, in the damp kitchen garden and at the slab as he breaks down carcasses. Fred does not do all this because it is fashionable - God knows he is a stranger to fashion - but because it is what he believes in. And good luck trying to change his views about any of these things because he is a stubborn sod knows his own mind.

I am very glad that Fred cares too much to compromise. It is why his food is so satisfying. I suspect that his eyes will narrow when he first reads this and I may well get a socially distanced poke in the ribs when we next bump into each other on Broughton Street. I don't mind because at some point in the hopefully not too distant future, I'll be sitting in bleu, for the first time in over a year, with a menu in one hand and something cold and alcoholic in the other.

Have I mentioned that I like Fred's food. That it makes me happy?