The Devil's Advocate

An Old Town Setting That Has Work to Do

Advocate's Close cuts off the Royal Mile at a steep angle, dropping away from the tourist current into a narrower, older Edinburgh. The close itself dates to the sixteenth century, and the building at number nine carries that compressed history into its stone walls and low-vaulted ceilings. Arriving here in the early evening, before the city's dining crowd arrives in force, gives you a clear read on what the space is actually doing: this is not a venue using heritage as backdrop decoration. The Victorian pump house bones are functional and present, and the bar is built to match them in scale and seriousness.

Edinburgh's Old Town has seen considerable drinking venue investment over the past decade. The city's cocktail scene, anchored partly by bars like Bramble and Panda & Sons, has pushed the standard for what a serious bar program looks like at a city-wide level. Against that backdrop, The Devil's Advocate occupies a slightly different position: it leads with whisky depth rather than cocktail technique, and it pairs that spirit program with a full kitchen, which most of its comparable set does not.

How the Menu Is Built, and What That Tells You

Menu architecture in a whisky-led bar reveals the establishment's hierarchy of priorities. At The Devil's Advocate, the structure signals clearly: the spirit list is the editorial core, and the food menu is designed to extend a session rather than anchor a full dining occasion in the traditional sense. This is not a restaurant that happens to have good drinks; it is a drinking venue that has committed to food seriously enough that you can eat well here without the meal feeling incidental.

That structural choice has consequences for how the space is used. Tables turn differently when the drinks list is the primary event. Guests arrive at the bar first, move to a table for food, and often return to the bar afterward. The pacing is looser than a conventional restaurant, and the menu supports that by offering dishes that work at multiple points in an evening rather than locking you into a single start-to-finish arc.

The whisky selection is calibrated for range rather than simple depth of bottle count. Scottish bars operating in this tier tend to organise their whisky lists by region and distillery character, which is a more useful navigational structure than price alone. A list built this way rewards the reader who already knows what they want and gives the uninitiated a framework for learning, rather than confronting them with an undifferentiated wall of options. That pedagogical quality in a drinks list is harder to achieve than it looks, and it is one of the markers that separates a serious whisky program from a large but directionless one.

On the cocktail side, the approach fits a pattern visible across the better-performing bars in Edinburgh's current scene: classics executed with precision, house signatures that are grounded in recognisable spirit categories, and a general avoidance of novelty for its own sake. Compared to the more technique-forward programs at venues like 69 Colebrooke Row in London or the heritage formalism of the Merchant Hotel in Belfast, The Devil's Advocate sits in a middle register: more grounded in the local drinking culture, less invested in the cocktail as performance.

Where It Sits in Edinburgh's Bar Tier

Edinburgh's drinking scene has consolidated around a few distinct formats in recent years. There are high-concept cocktail bars doing technical work, traditional whisky bars operating on heritage and bottle count, and a smaller group of venues doing both with a kitchen attached. The Devil's Advocate belongs to the third category, which is the most commercially demanding to execute because it requires sustained quality across two different disciplines.

Within that peer group, the Old Town location is both an asset and a constraint. Advocate's Close is within easy walking distance of the main hotel corridors around the Royal Mile and Princes Street, which means the venue captures a mix of informed visitors and local regulars. That mixed audience requires a drinks program and a food menu that can hold both demographics, and the menu architecture here is built with that tension in mind.

Elsewhere in the UK, comparable venues operating on a whisky-and-kitchen format include Schofield's in Manchester and, at the more casual end, Mojo Leeds in Leeds, though the formats diverge significantly in price tier and formality.

Planning a Visit

The venue is at 9 Advocate's Close, off the Royal Mile, EH1 1ND. The Devil's Advocate is a bar in Edinburgh with a 4.5 Google rating from 4,923 reviews and an average spend of about $25 per person. The close is easy to miss from street level; look for the entrance on the south side of the High Street between St Giles' Cathedral and the George IV Bridge intersection. On foot from Waverley station, the walk takes under ten minutes. Evening is the natural window: the bar comes into its own after six, when the kitchen is running at full capacity and the space fills at a pace that rewards arriving on the earlier side of prime time rather than at the peak of it.

Visitors who have spent time at other serious whisky-led bars across Britain, among them the Horseshoe Bar in Glasgow or hotel bar programs like the 24 Royal Terrace Hotel in Edinburgh itself, will find The Devil's Advocate operating at the more curated end of that spectrum. For those arriving after an Edinburgh evening that has already begun elsewhere, bars like Aurora offer a softer late-evening landing; The Devil's Advocate is better suited as a destination in its own right rather than a final stop. Internationally, the format has parallels in venues like Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu and L'Atelier Du Vin in Brighton, where the drinks list carries an editorial weight that most bars delegate entirely to the food.