Edinburgh Haggis Society – SADLY ALREADY CLOSED

Tucked away behind the Apple Shop, just along from the Guildford Arms, a new pop-up showcasing the great chieftain of the pudding race has sprung into being. After a good wander around Festival hotspots, we popped in to The Edinburgh Haggis Society to try its wares.

I was joined by my mother Anne, who’d most recently quested at the Haymarket Bar.

The menu offering is simple: meaty haggis or veggie haggis served with neeps and tatties and a whisky sauce (£5). You can add crisps or shortbread and a drink for an extra quid. We opted to try both haggis varieties, a bag of Mackie’s haggis crisps, Walker’s shortbread, Irn Bru and San Pellegrino limonata.

While the interior is quite informal it has the feel of a permanent venue so I’d be very surprised to see it close its doors at the end of August.

Served in takeaway boxes, our haggis dishes were soon with us. With two good scoops of haggis, the neeps looked rather pale and uninspiring and the tatties rather meagre.

Both dishes proved pretty good eating with the tattie and neeps both solidly good, with a nicely smooth texture, and the haggis as it should have been.

The whisky sauce, which we had on the side, came in a meaty and veggie variety, also, which was a good touch. The veggie sauce had a strong whiff of popular yeast extract about it, so won’t please everyone, and the meaty variety had room for improvement, too.

So overall, I actually rather liked the Edinburgh Haggis Society. It’s a simple but very good idea delivered in a smart little shop. It has room to improve, but if they continue it beyond the bounds of August, which I suspect they will, there’s plenty of time to build on their solidly decent current offering.