Divino Enoteca

A kitchen handed over by time

The plates leave the pass uncluttered under Salvatore Agate, Head Chef at Divino Enoteca in Edinburgh, where the cellar room keeps the kitchen close to the wine. Agate took the head chef post in 2025 after serving here as Senior Sous Chef from 2023 to 2025, a short step in title but a longer one in responsibility. Before Edinburgh, he worked as Sous Chef at Osteria Antica Bologna from 2012 to 2023, a stretch that gave him time on the tools inside an Italian kitchen before the station became his own.

His brief at Divino is not built around display. Agate has described a wish for guests to leave with uncomplicated joy, which, in practice, means clear plates, ingredients kept legible, and a team with enough room to stay alert. He also speaks of bringing the more niche Southern Italian dishes of his childhood to Edinburgh. That matters in this room because the restaurant already carries a family Italian inheritance through the Crolla family and the Vittoria Group. Agate’s work sits inside that lineage without treating it as a museum piece. The menu can hold rigatoni alla Norcina, orecchiette with sausage and ’nduja, beef cheek in Merlot, and a fondente with coconut gelato, but the discipline is in how plainly each dish reads when it reaches the table.

Wine sets the pace of the pass

Divino’s kitchen works beside a wine program that shapes the room as much as the cooking does. The list runs to over 200 wines by the bottle, with up to 40 by the glass, and the Enomatic system lets the cellar pour 175ml, 125ml, or 25ml measures without leaving opened bottles to tire. That changes how a guest can move through a meal. A pasta course can meet a small pour before a fuller glass follows the braise.

The food keeps to a contemporary Italian frame, with local Scottish produce folded into Italian imports and a Southern Italian accent under Agate. Guancia di Manzo al Merlot gives the kitchen a slow-cooked anchor, while orecchiette con salsiccia e ’nduja brings heat, fat, and ricotta into a baked pasta shape that belongs to comfort rather than polish for its own sake. Rigatoni alla Norcina keeps the method closer to the centre of the plate: pasta, sausage, cream, and the judgment to stop before weight becomes dullness. The restaurant holds a current award, and the by-the-glass program has a size in the room. It lets the pass and the cellar speak in smaller, more exact measures.

Below the street, brick and oak

The room is below the street, a basement cellar with exposed brick, soft lighting, leather chairs, banquettes, oak floors, artwork, and lanterns. It asks for a lower register from the service team and gets one. Conversation stays close to the table. The counterpoint is the pass, where the rhythm has to remain sharper than the room feels: pasta lifted at the right moment, braised beef glazed rather than drowned, dessert held long enough for the fondente to keep its centre.

Divino’s position in Old Town gives it the feeling of a found room rather than a frontage. The wine bar character is not decoration around the restaurant; it is the working condition of the place. Bottles, brick, candlelight, and the Enomatic machine sit in the same line of sight as the food, so Agate’s Southern Italian cooking arrives with the cellar already in the glass. The craft is still being renewed at the pass by Salvatore Agate with Guancia di Manzo al Merlot.