Four Stars My Eye: Edinburgh, a Hotel That Lied, and the Brunch That Fixed Everything

The flight delay was two hours. Two hours of airport purgatory — that specific, fluorescent-lit hell where time moves differently and the departure board becomes the only thing in the world that matters, and it keeps lying to you. Delayed. Delayed. Delayed. The optimism of the original departure time receding into mythology while you conduct a slow, hostile audit of every decision that brought you to this departure gate with a lukewarm coffee and the gathering suspicion that the evening is not going to go the way you planned.

It didn't.

The hotel had described itself as four stars. This is, I now understand, a classification system with considerably more flexibility than I had previously appreciated. Four stars, it turns out, can mean many things. It can mean crisp linen and a minibar and a shower that makes decisions. Or it can mean — and I want to be precise here, because precision matters when injustice is being documented — a room that occupies the philosophical space directly above a hostel, wearing the costume of respectability without any of the substance.

We arrived late. Tired. The particular tired that is made worse by the specific injustice of a delay that was nobody's fault and therefore nobody to direct the frustration at. The kind of tired that makes you irrational about small things and entirely rational about large ones.

The large thing was the room.

I thought about not naming the hotel, because I am a reasonable person. However a marketing executive who posts optimistic pictures to entice customers should not be rewarded - so the hotel we stayed in is called the Grove House Hotel. A place advertising and pricing itself as four stars has entered into a contract with its guests, and this room was in breach. The shower was decent. The bed was fine. Fine is the most damning word in the English language when applied to a bed you were hoping would save the evening. The room was basic and soulless in the way that only a room trying to be neither of those things can achieve — the corporate art, the aggressive neutrality of the colour scheme, the sense that personality had been actively removed as a design decision. The walls were thin enough to introduce us, involuntarily and in real time, to the social lives of our neighbours.

Four stars. Four. I have stayed in places that charged half the price, made no claims whatsoever about their star rating, and delivered twice the dignity.

We went to sleep in the particular bad mood that travel inflicts when it decides to stop cooperating — the accumulated weight of a delayed flight, a late arrival, a room that was technically adequate and spiritually deflating. Edinburgh was outside the window, doing its magnificent, indifferent thing, and I was too annoyed to appreciate it.

And then came Saturday morning.

Five minutes on foot. That's all it took, and through the door of Loudons on Fountainbridge.

The mood, which had been nursing itself overnight like a slow-burning grievance, began — against its will — to lift.

A room that was busy without being frantic. Staff who moved at the pace of people who know what they're doing. A menu that was actually trying. Coffee that arrived without being asked for twice.

By the time the chorizo potato mash landed in front of me, the delayed flight was a story rather than an injury. By the time I was sitting with a full cup of coffee I didn't want to drink because I didn't want anything to interrupt the last bite of the dish, the hotel carpet had been forgiven, if not forgotten.

My dining partner had the French toast. I was permitted a small portion, which is the tax you pay for ordering something less interesting than the person across from you, and I accepted it without complaint.

It arrived in two waves, the way the best food does — the first impression and then the real thing underneath it. The initial sweetness was instant and uncomplicated, the kind of flavour that locates something in the back of your memory from about thirty-five years ago — Saturday mornings, no particular responsibilities, sugar as its own reward.

And then the blackcurrant compote arrived, about half a second later, and reminded you with elegant efficiency that you are not, in fact, a child. You are an adult. You have been to places. You have eaten things. You are capable of appreciating the tart intelligence of a flavour that gives you the joy without the sugar crash, the complexity without the lecture. The compote didn't compete with the sweetness. It completed it.

I briefly reconsidered my order. I did not voice this. There are some thoughts you keep to yourself at brunch.

This is what good food does when it's doing its job. It doesn't just feed you. It recalibrates you. It reinstates your basic faith in the project of travelling to places and turning up and seeing what happens.

The hotel had taken something away. Loudons gave it back, with interest, before eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning.