Contini George Street

A Banking Hall Repurposed Into Edinburgh's Casual Italian

George Street has spent the last two decades shedding its financial services identity and replacing it with hospitality. The grand Victorian and Edwardian buildings that once housed banks and insurers are now bars, restaurants, and hotels, their double-height ceilings and ornate plasterwork now working harder for dinner service than for overdraft appointments. Contini sits squarely in that tradition, occupying a former banking hall at 103 George Street and keeping the architecture largely intact: soaring pillars, an ornate ceiling, grey walls, and a massive central chandelier that anchors the room. The design additions, bright-pink hanging lampshades, a lively baroque fresco across part of one wall, read as confident rather than compensatory. The space already had the bones; the restaurant simply dressed it.

Contini George Street is a modern Italian trattoria in Edinburgh’s New Town, with a Google rating of 4.4 from 1,722 reviews and an average spend of about $95 per person. The city's formal dining is dominated by modern British and European tasting menus at the upper end, with venues like The Kitchin, Martin Wishart, AVERY, Condita, and Timberyard all operating at the ££££ tier with structured menus and fixed formats. Contini positions itself differently: it feeds people across the entire day, without the commitment of a tasting menu or a rigid booking process, and it does so through an Italian lens that feels genuinely consistent rather than loosely adopted. That positioning fills a gap in the city's offering.

How the Day Unfolds at Contini

It runs on the assumption that eating is not always an event, that sometimes you want a coffee and a pastry, sometimes a plate of pasta, sometimes a glass of wine and a single shared dish, and that the room should accommodate all of those without making any one of them feel out of place. Contini operates on that premise from breakfast through to dinner.

At lunch, the crowd skews toward Edinburgh residents rather than tourists, which is often a reliable indicator of consistent value in a city that sees heavy visitor traffic in peak months. The room is busy and at times loud, but the double-height ceiling absorbs some of that noise and the layout allows for a degree of separation between tables. It is not a venue for a quiet dinner conversation in the way that a smaller, lower-capacity room might be, but the energy suits the all-day format and the broadly convivial character of Italian dining culture.

The Menu: Italian Framing, Scottish Sourcing

The menu holds to Italian structure and technique without treating it as a museum piece. A plate of trofiette pasta with sausage, cremini mushrooms, dried porcini, fresh cream, rocket, and Parmesan is the kind of dish that signals kitchen confidence in the basics: the trofiette format, native to Liguria, holds sauce well, and the combination of fresh and dried mushroom is a technique used across northern Italian cooking to build depth without heaviness. Rump of Highland lamb with cannellini purée, pan-fried puntarella, and salsa verde is a more interesting move: it uses Scottish produce, Highland lamb sits at the quality end of British meat, within an Italian framework, the cannellini and salsa verde both pulling from central and southern Italian tradition.

The dessert list follows Italian convention with tiramisu as the anchor, alongside panettone al forno and a selection of gelati and sorbetti. These are not afterthoughts in the Italian caffè tradition; the sweet course carries as much weight culturally as the pasta, and a room that takes tiramisu seriously is one that understands the ritual of the Italian meal rather than just its aesthetic. For venues in the UK that do Italian genuinely rather than decoratively, comparisons might run to the informal end of the London brasserie scene, though Contini's George Street setting gives it a different architectural register than most city-centre Italian rooms in Britain.

The Wine List and Drinks

All-Italian wine list is one of the more defining features of the operation. Restricting a list entirely to Italian producers is a curation decision that signals both identity and knowledge: it asks the kitchen and front of house to understand Italian wine at sufficient depth to guide guests through regions, varieties, and styles without the safety net of French or New World alternatives. The list opens at £25 a bottle, which is an accessible entry point for a George Street address. Italian wine at that price point typically covers southern producers, Puglia, Sicily, Campania, where quality has risen sharply over the last decade as international attention has shifted from Barolo and Brunello toward more affordable appellations.

Drinks offer runs beyond wine to cover all bases across the day, consistent with the caffè model where aperitivo, coffee, and digestivo are as structurally important as the meal itself.