Café Renroc

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

Walking into Renroc is a warming experience: enthusiasm permeates the place and a friendly welcome is quickly followed by personalised service. The area upstairs is stylish and airy, while the bistro-style basement is warm and sleepily lit, and a real neighbourhood feel runs through the whole venue. Owners Jane and Billy Ross pride themselves on their strong community links, and are on first name terms with regulars and suppliers alike. For lunch, Edinburgh favourite Breadwinner supplies Renroc's famous strombolis, and the café offers a good range of fillings for wraps and panini. The home-made specials menu offers more heartening fare, but is somewhat misleading: with no kitchen, the only properly home-made dishes are sandwiches. The meals they buy in, however, are locally made and of great quality: moussaka is spicy and sweet with a proper velvety bechamel, while the Thai-style green prawn curry is cleverly balanced, but let down texturally – reheating in the microwave never gets the best out of prawns. The Rosses are never short of ideas to keep Renroc alive. Film nights and live music are weekly events, and the complementary therapy clinic in the back rooms downstairs means that a cup of herbal tea could be followed by a massage, cranio-sacral treatment, or, if you're up to it, colonic hydrotherapy. Not many cafés can boast that.

• High point: Lovely coffee, lovely smiles, lovely place
• Low point: Vegetarians may be frustrated by the specials board