If you haven’t entered any dates, the rate shown is provided directly by the hotel and represents the cheapest double room (including tax) available in the next 60 days.
Prices have been converted from the hotel’s local currency (GBP249.40), via openexchangerates.org, using today’s exchange rate.
Style
Grand Georgian
Setting
Behind Calton Hill
Explore
21212 hotel is a regal and refined restaurant with rooms in Edinburgh, where grand Georgian design meets its match in the kitchen. The restaurant’s chefs cook up a storm behind a perspex screen. Interiors are spacious and serene, perfect to return to, post-indulgence in the dining room.
Get this when you book through us:
A mini decanter of sloe gin in your room on arrival
Four.
12pm. Earliest check-in, 3pm. Check-in past 10pm can't be done without prior guarantee – call the Smith24 Team for more details.
Double rooms from £145.00, including tax at 20 per cent.
Rates include Continental breakfast.
The hotel's restaurant will be closing for a little while from 1 April 2023.
Free WiFi throughout, and Noble Isle bath products, Bluetooth speaker and free bottled water in rooms.
Decisions should be based on varying penchants for bathrooms and views. Rooms on the third floor come with huge Spanish showers, sturdy egg-shaped bath tubs and twin sinks. (Opt for either a view of the garden or the Firth of Forth.) The two bedrooms on the fourth floor come with wet rooms.
A refined palate for some serious taste sensations; binoculars to take up Calton Hill and admire the city’s sights close up. Leave your bagpipes at home and be serenaded by the experts instead.
Guests with mobility issues should note rooms are on the second and third floor; there's no lift in this Georgian townhouse. If you plan to eat at 21212, reserve your table well in advance – they fill up fast, and guests don't get priority.
You'll need to leave tots under five at home, but children aged five-and-up are welcome in the hotel and restaurant (there’s no special menu though).
If there’s a big group of you (up to 10), book out the grand dining room on the first floor. Smaller groups of six or so can opt for the Pod, a cosy, circular space with a dramatic digital Caravaggio print for wallpaper.
It’d be rude not to scrub up. This is a destination restaurant in a listed building, after all.
The restaurant is the star of the show – 21212 is named after its menu structure (three courses where you get two choices, two where you get one). The chefs get to work behind a perspex screen (on show from the elegant, chandelier-enhanced dining room), whipping up deconstructed dishes with a different taste per mouthful (and the entire menu's animal based: vegans, this isn't the restaurant for you). The lamb curry consists of braised flank, kebab and Merquez sausage, with banana and cucumber confit, currants and peanuts, celeriac and sticky rice coleslaw, basil leaves, saffron, and yoghurt and onion soubise sauce. You know what they say about variety.
The bar is in the upstairs Drawing Room, a sumptuous space with high ceilings and luxurious furnishings, perfect for pre- or post-dinner drinks.
A Continental breakfast is served from 8.15am until 10am; lunch noon till 2pm; dinner from 5.45pm to 8.45pm. The restaurant is closed on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
No food, but drinks can be delivered to bedrooms.
The hotel is on Edinburgh's Royal Terrace, right by the Playhouse and at the bottom of Calton Hill where you'll be privy to monumental city sights.
Edinburgh’s international airport is a 25-minute drive from 21212.
The city’s Waverley train station is half a mile from the hotel. Taxis cost roughly £5 each way. East Coast (www.eastcoast.co.uk) operates direct services from London King’s Cross.
The hotel is in the centre of Edinburgh, just behind Carlton Hill and at the top of Leith Walk. There’s metered parking available on the Royal Terrace and surrounding streets.
The hotel sits at the foot of Calton Hill; climb to the top for a photogenic city panorama with the unfinished National Monument in the foreground. While you’re up there, see what’s on at the Collective Gallery, where modern art is displayed. The Edinburgh Playhouse is close by for musicals and concerts, and Broughton Street is renowned for its quirky indie shops and eateries – Scandi bakery Söderberg makes cracking cinnamon and cardamom buns. Princes Street and gardens are a five-minute walk, so you can sweep through the National Gallery, admire the genteel Georgian houses in the New Town then hike up the Mound to the Royal Mile, stopping to pap Edinburgh Castle along the way. The Old Town’s cobbled main drag has historic monuments aplenty, between the castle at the top and Palace of Holyroodhouse at the bottom. Along the way you’ll find the Camera Obscura, Museum of Childhood and several grand ‘kirks’. Things take a grim turn, too: the Surgeons’ Hall Museum has ghoulish artefacts, such as purses made from the skin of hanged murderers Burke and Hare, and ghost walks run up and down the mile (and sometimes into the labyrinth of crypts beneath it).
L’Escargot Bleu on Broughton Street is neighbourhood French dining at its finest; come for the cassoulet and mussels, but leave room for the cheeseboard. If you’re down by the docks, pop into Porto & Fi, a café, deli and bistro hybrid serving freshly caught lobster, wild boar meatballs and such. The Edinburgh outpost of London’s Irani café-inspired Dishoom is around the corner on St Andrew Square. Pop in for breakfasts of bacon-stuffed naan and free-flowing chai lattes or sharing plate dinners of spicy daal, lamb biryani and creamy pau bhaji. It's worth the 40-minute stroll to the Leith Docks, to see the Royal Yacht Britannia and to dine at the Kitchin, the excellent eatery from auspiciously named chef Tom Kitchin, where your meal starts with a map of where all ingredients are sourced. On the way, swing by Cables Wynd House (aka the Banana Block); this Brutalist block was the setting for the even more brutal Irvine Welsh tome Trainspotting, now it's a Category A-listed building.
Edinburgh is awash with bars (the infamous Rose Street pub crawl has 12 stops along one street), so take your pick and pick your poison. For copious drams of Scotland's aqua vitae, try Whiski on the Royal Mile or the more informal Black Cat on Rose Street. Paradise Palms promises kitschy fun, and the Hanging Bat is a Scandi-style hangout that's perfect for a swift pint. In Leith, Nobles has chichi cocktails, Malt and Hops on South Street pulls CAMRA-approved pints and the Roseleaf is a sweet welcoming drinkery where mixed drinks come in teacups.
Since I wasted away my late teenage years at Auld Reekie’s major seat of learning, I’ve never been back to the Scottish capital. A combination of being a lousy student, plus having a grant so minuscule it compelled me to live on smoked sausage suppers (one of the capital’s more recherché culinary specialities) and ‘Carlsberg Special With a Vodka In It’, left me with less-than-happy memories. Nor, back then, was Edinburgh big on the kind of thing that might appeal to the trainee sybarite. Little wonder I spent so much time huddling in gorgeous Edwardian pubs against the biting East Coast wind.
But my, how things have changed. Edinburgh now boasts the greatest number of Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK outside London. And one of them, the quirkily monikered 21212, offers the ideal excuse to go back. A certifiably insane taxi driver drops us at a perfect example of Edinburgh’s legendary Georgian architecture, a towering townhouse, all impossibly lofty ceilings, sweeping staircase (complete with original butlers trays) and stunning windows.
My Mr Smith is utterly smitten, not only with our restaurant with rooms, but with Edinburgh in general. If he says, ‘This has to be Britain’s most beautiful city,’ just once more, any romantic notions might be severely dashed. Which at 21212 would be an enormous shame. From the giant Caravaggio mural in the ‘pod’ in which we take our breakfast – as remarkable as everything else: eggs turned into Mirò paintings with slicks of herb and jewels of Bayonne ham; locally smoked salmon generously strewn with caviar – to the vast, snowy linened bed, this a scene perfectly designed for seduction.
Our hosts are chef Paul Kitching and his partner Katie O’Brien, the former creating some kind of crazy chemistry in the restaurant’s open kitchen, the latter charming us to pieces on reception or serving breakfast. We’re in room 1, up a staircase carpeted in arresting thistle-and-moth patterned carpets from Glaswegian designer duo, Timorous Beasties. Our windows look out over greenery to the distant Firth of Forth; a huge, crisp-sheeted bed lolls on a curtained platform; there’s a large but discreet plasma-screen TV, a soft, nubbly sofa to collapse into, and masses of glossy, foodie-focused goodies to read. A lovely touch is a vintage decanter of port. Nightcaps, ahoy.
As for the huge bathroom, it is rather like having our own personal spa. A vast shower offers gusts of high-pressure water; an egg-shaped bath is most glamorous and comes complete with floor-set uplighters for creating a special bathtime mood; there are Noble Isle products on tap. And what’s this – underfloor heating? The toastiest toes, guaranteed, even in the depths of a Scottish winter: bliss.
The hotel is right next door to Calton Hill, a steep stagger up for an astonishing view of the city. And down the swoop of Leith Walk lie the bars and restaurant of the old docks. We take a walk down to the vaguely bonkers new Scottish Parliament building. Then it’s up the Royal Mile, along with every other tourist in town, to the Castle... Although, alas, we don’t quite make it.
We’re lured back to those glorious Edwardian pubs – the Kenilworth, Guildord and Abbotsford and seriously ravishing Café Royale, all beautifully preserved slices of the boozy past. We head down to louche Stockbridge and the Bailey, Kay’s and the St Vincent. I have stovies, the ugliest foodstuff ever seen, in the handsome Cumberland Bar. The oniony potatoes may cause Mr Smith to blanch at the eccentricities of the Scottish diet, but, mmm, they're good.
We finally weave back – ‘We thought you’d got lost,’ says Katie – and concur it’s like staying in a pal’s super-posh home. After a splash about in our ‘spa’, dinner beckons. The brocade-lined dining room, where dreamy, dried-sage-coloured drapes create an intimate, boudoir atmosphere, is the setting for a culinary thrill ride. Here’s how one dish appears on the menu, verbatim: ‘Smoked Haddock Made Interesting. Gently baked haddock with olive oil, saffron + jumbo scallop, baked bean, ratatouille, two black ingredients??, buttered crumpets, very tiny summer vegetables, lightly curried creamy smoked salmon bisque (smoked salmon is always interesting)’. Isn’t that heaven?
Half the fun is trying to indentify the different constituents. A musky wafer turns out to be dehydrated mushroom ‘parchment’; a little waxed paper cup contains porridge and wheat milk. I’ve eaten my way round the world (as my waistline attests) and I can confidently say that Paul is a one-off. His presentation, especially, is unique: tiny elements of each dish jostling and hiding others. It’s like a treasure hunt. There are bizarre, tricky two pronged forks, coffee is served in paper cups; Paul’s humour may be playful, but he has the skill to pull it off.
I’m trying hard to find a whinge about 21212 (the name, if you’re wondering, comes from the menu’s unusual binary layout: two courses, then one and so on). The stairs might prove a challenge for anyone with mobility issues (or those who’ve enjoyed too much of Edinburgh’s liquid hospitality). I suppose, like an excited child, I do like to find a minibar in my room. And it might be nice instead of all-French cheeses, to have Scottish ones on the menu. But you can tell I’m struggling. The hotel – and its lovely owners – have made this food critic look at her old alma mater with a new, glowing appreciation. And that’s no small achievement.
Price per night from $308.78
