Street-food darlings Junk may have landed a permanent home in a former beauty parlour on South Clerk Street, but the key to understanding how they turn trash to treasure doesn’t lie in their funky brick-exposed slip of a restaurant with an NYC-vibe. It’s not even in their clutch of street food awards, won more or less straight out of the starting gate. Nope, the key to Junk is their website, where they share dozens of recipes that (apparently) us mere mortals can easily replicate at home. That their recipe for common or garden ‘chups’ features three different garnishes and around 30 steps is a major clue that this place obsesses over simple ingredients and takes them to places your average cook just does not. 

That said, Junk’s box-fresh creds have perhaps been slightly over-egged: co-owners Jade Watson and Cameron Laidlaw have 20-plus years of hospitality experience between them. In other words, they knew the rules before breaking them. Junk is a brilliant blend of the best of the restaurant world; warm, welcoming and relaxed, with street food’s four-sauces-in-your-face aesthetic. 

That means perfectly seared coley sitting in a thick bed of Thai curry sauce, crisp tatties with sobrassada and black garlic which are worth ordering twice, and prawn cocktail showing up as a dainty skewer of prawns on a soft pile of avo and sambal. The lasagne bite is genius, every surface becoming the ‘crispy bits’ you fight with your siblings for at home. Dinner is fixed price, though whether that’s another nod to high/low dining culture or just a canny way to manage margins isn’t clear. Either way, £32 gets you three sharing plates, which means a trio of lucky diners can sweep the whole menu between them: an eminently sensible idea. Sure, there’s the usual chat about food coming when it’s ready but deft service manages the flow perfectly with a break to order another (excellent) cocktail in-between. Not your average junk, indeed. 

58 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, wearejunk.co.uk