One Canon – Improvement required
One Canon – Improvement required
Once the home of good pizza and decent beer, One Canon’s standards have slipped.
Head downhill on Broughton Street and you will eventually hit Canonmills. You will also hit One Canon, which unfortunately, has also gone downhill.
I first came here a couple of years ago, and enjoyed a sourdough pizza – chewy crusts, stretchy mozzarella, you know the drill. Accompanying it was some decent beer. No cask, and a bit on the pricey side, but still worth it. I was pleased to see the pub stocking local breweries such as Campervan and Pilot. I had similar experiences a two or three more times.
Having not been in for a year or so, I went back couple of weeks ago. The place has changed.
Not the interior – it’s still got the same modern prints on the exposed brick walls, various bits of painted wood and things hanging from the ceiling. Some healthy-looking house plants are dotted around the place. It’s everything you’d expect from a place which has called itself a “modern Scottish pub”. The more ornate ceiling harks back to its past as a more traditional venue. Once upon a time, I find online, it was an “old man pub” named The Cross and Corner.
No, what’s changed is the quality of the food and drink. The keg beer is still local, but tastes unkempt. A Barney’s Stone’s Throw lager (normally fresh, crisp and reliable) has a staleness to it. It suggests the lines could do with a clean. Most grievously, Campervan’s Extra Black – one of this city’s greatest beers – lets me down for the first time ever. It lacks the beautiful creaminess you should get from a nitro porter, and instead of a rich, deep flavour it has a metallic quality to it. The only decent pint is the Long White Cloud from Tempest, a pale, hazy thing which adequately does the job.
The pizza is not what it was. The crust has become congealed and heavy and the cheese has coagulated into a greasy mess. To top it all off, I find out that the establishment failed its last food hygiene rating. It was given an “improvement required” label in July this year.
It’s really hard to run a pub nowadays. I get that. I would struggle to do it well and make the finances work. But it’s a shame that a place that bills itself as a public house and pizzeria does substandard beer and poor pizza. I hope it can return to the quality it once had.
On the plus side, my team did win the pub quiz. (That’s two out of two, for those counting.)
Where is it?
Where next?
Go to a proper pub: Cask and Barrel.
The Chaser
In the interests of fairness, I should point out that One Canon is by no means the only establishment in Edinburgh to fail its hygiene inspection. You can see all 356 failures on this map, which was last updated in February 2024.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the “fresh ale” idea from Carlsberg Marston’s. I failed to mention that Carlsberg now owns the whole company, having bought Marston’s 40% stake for £206m in July. They are the producers of McEwan’s beers.
I learned that in an article from top beer writer Pete Brown, in his piece about how craft beer producers are all secretly real ale geeks – and they may end up saving the cask industry.