Tomos Parry's Brat — the Basque-inflected, wood-fire restaurant in Shoreditch that has held a Michelin star since 2020 and exerted a quiet but considerable influence on how London thinks about live-fire cooking — will open a permanent Edinburgh site on Victoria Street this summer. The announcement confirms months of speculation and marks the first time the concept has extended beyond its London base.
The Edinburgh site will occupy a double-fronted unit on Victoria Street in the Old Town, a location that has considerable restaurant pedigree and sits at the heart of one of Edinburgh's most active dining corridors. The space is understood to have been in fit-out since the turn of the year, with a late June opening now the working target.
What Brat Edinburgh will be
Parry has been consistent in saying that any expansion of Brat beyond London would have to feel genuinely right for its location rather than a transplant of the Shoreditch original. The Edinburgh site will share the foundational elements of the Brat cooking philosophy — whole fish and meat cooked over wood, a menu that shifts with produce availability, an emphasis on the wild and the foraged — but will develop its own identity rooted in Scottish produce and the cooking traditions of the country it finds itself in.
"Scotland has extraordinary produce," Parry said in a statement. "The fish, the game, the cattle. The brief for Edinburgh is to do justice to what's on the doorstep while keeping the fire at the centre of everything."
The kitchen will be led by a Scottish head chef whose name has not yet been announced, with Parry dividing his time across both sites in the early months of operation.
The Edinburgh dining context
For Edinburgh, the arrival of Brat carries weight beyond the culinary. The city has a strong and growing independent restaurant scene — the Edinburgh Food Studio, Condita, Timberyard and Heron have all built genuine reputations in recent years — but has lacked the high-profile London spillover that has arrived in Manchester, Bristol and Leeds. Brat changes that.
The timing, with Edinburgh's summer tourist season beginning in earnest in late June, gives the restaurant a significant potential audience from day one. The challenge will be converting transient visitors into the kind of repeat local clientele that sustains a serious restaurant beyond the initial excitement of opening.
Reservations for Brat Edinburgh are expected to open in May via the restaurant's website.