Restaurant Martin Wishart

This review appears in the The List's Eating & Drinking Guide 2008 – in the shops now or buy online.

With its chic, neutral colour scheme, soft carpeting and cream upholstering, Restaurant Martin Wishart wears its Michelin star with Hollywood ease. The food is so mind-alteringly pleasurable, so far removed from mere sustenance that you might forget it's actually legal. After the miniature magic of delicate canapés, such as haggis bonbon or silky mushroom in soya nage, an à la carte selection or the six-course tasting menu (£60) await. From such stunningly subtle combinations as chilled sweetcorn soup with a basil sorbet, via equally lovingly concocted game or seafood numbers, the curve keeps rising. Then try a main dish such as melting Ross-shire beef with musky mushroom ravioli and light pumpkin purée, before an optional diversion at the king of all cheeseboards, then finish with a dessert as pertly perfect as apple and calvados soufflé with apple sorbet lollipop. There's also a full vegetarian menu. The staff are extremely knowledgeable – they seem to have a PhD in every dish – and carry off synchronised cloche-lifting with effortless panache. While undoubtedly consummate masters of their art, they are not stuffy: the service is genuinely warm as well as magnificently professional. You really won't be better looked after anywhere else in Edinburgh – and nor will the pleasure centres of your brain ever be quite the same again.

• High point: Prepare to be utterly spoilt
• Low point: Trying to speak to your companion while dying of pleasure