The Best Places in North Leith & around

A converted Leith warehouse overlooking the old port, with a large kitchen window that lets you watch the brigade work if you snag the right table. Tom Kitchin's flagship is a fine-dining room built on French technique and Scottish seasons, and his pig's head with west coast langoustine is about as close to a house signature as you get. It holds a Michelin star and a tasting menu that runs wherever the larder leads.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star
2. National Restaurant Awards 2026 · #49 · The National Restaurant Awards

A Michelin-starred neighbourhood restaurant on a quiet Leith street, where the counter seats look into an open kitchen and the window seats look out toward the Port. Scottish produce does most of the talking, sea trout and Fife berries among the things that show up on the tasting menu. The room is bright and unfussy, the service matches it, and the cooking has the kind of quiet precision that doesn't need to announce itself.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

A one-Michelin-star dining room on the old Leith waterfront, where Scottish grouse and Orkney scallops meet classic French technique without a superfluous element on the plate. The room is bright and contemporary, a deliberate evolution rather than something that happened by accident. This is the kind of formal dinner that requires a reservation, a clear head, and possibly a taxi back across the city.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

A former pub in Leith that now runs a daily-changing menu of around a dozen dishes, most of them tilting toward the sea. The chef spent years in serious kitchens across Europe and Asia before landing here with a lighter touch, and the result is a bistro that feels settled and unhurried despite being barely off the ground. It landed on the National Restaurant Awards list in 2026, which for a room this small is a statement. The wine list won't alarm anyone's bank account.

1. National Restaurant Awards 2026 · #51 · The National Restaurant Awards
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A café, bar, and bottle shop in Leith that holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, Ardfern pulls off the neat trick of being somewhere you'd go for a lazy brunch, a glass from a serious wine list, or small plates in the evening that taste like someone actually cooked them. The food leans hearty and familiar in a way that makes you stop mid-bite. Hash browns with whipped feta and jalapeño ketchup are the kind of thing that becomes a habit.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Sea trout pastrami is the dish that tells you what kind of place this is: a seafood restaurant on Leith's Shore that lets the fish do the talking without much theatrical interference. The menu moves from shareable small plates at lunch to proper sit-down plates come evening, whole sole, half lobster, and the like. The room has the easy warmth of a place where the staff seem to mean it.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Six tables in a narrow shopfront on Great Junction Street, easy to walk past and painful to have missed. Dùthchas is a set-menu dinner spot where the chefs come out to talk you through each course themselves, which sounds precious but lands warmly. The cooking is seasonal and quietly inventive, and the wine pairing leans into obscure bottles rather than safe names, which is half the fun.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A compact, Nordic-feeling restaurant near the edge of Leith, with an open kitchen running the length of one wall and counter seats for anyone who wants to watch the work up close. The tasting menu moves through Scottish ingredients, scallops among the regulars, shifting from delicate to punchy without losing its footing. The room is pared back enough that you notice the warmth of the service, which is the point.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant