By now, the upmarket Scottish seafood restaurant is an entity as generic and predictable as the average branch of Burger King. Their homogeneity is dictated by custom, expectation and local bylaw. Their decor is provided by the nearest sea life centre. There’s always hot and cold running smoked salmon and crusty brown bread that looks like loft insulation and halves of lemon in Ena Sharples hair-nets. There are always fish knives — nobody knows how to use them but they do look the part. Sea bass and Stornoway black pudding come through the back door by the hundredweight.

The spiritual home, the epicentre and omphalos of the modern Scottish seafood restaurant is Leith waterfront. It’s like the Scallop Quarter down there; the world’s your oyster and vice versa. When the service industry arrived here in the late 1980s (actually, there was always a service industry in Leith but often it found itself spending the night in the cells) it invariably took the form of the upscale pisceria.

Logic had determined that Leith would specialise in seafood because it was next to the water. As a proposition it was what they call a no-brainer. But it was consistent only until you looked at the water in question and remembered that the word “shore” is a corruption of the English word “sewer”. It was then you realised that any seafood that did happen to be in there was sharing its habitat with slicks of diesel and drunk sailors and the unspeakable flotsam of this most colourful of enclaves.

Seafood, nonetheless, still remains Leith’s stock in trade. There’s Fishers and The Ship on the Shore and Skippers and Guiliano's on the Shore. And there’s also The Shore. All these shores get so confusing they remind you eventually of the wedding scene in Goodfellas where all the men are named Peter or Paulie. It hardly helps that the street on which most of them are located is also named The Shore.

The Shore was among the vanguard of restaurants that kick-started the gentrification of Leith. It was a fixture. But then the fixtures came unstuck and the place went off like a four-day-old halibut. It has just been bought by the Fishers mini-chain, had the hook removed and been thrown back into the stream. Fishers is next door, though — and opening another seafood restaurant would be like setting up stall next to Newcastle’s leading coal merchant.

So the new Shore takes a different approach — the fish inventory has been scaled back, you could say. Instead, it goes the full John Bull happy-ploughman modern-Anglo route, not dissimilar to the exemplary The Dogs in the New Town. The trademarks are still in place, of course: the decor remains a cross between a library and a bordello; the staff are still experienced, male and old school; the dining room is still a cramped, bijou teashop-like affair. But the food has high hopes of going up to Eton once it’s passed the 11-Plus. You find it gives you the strong urge to read some GK Chesterton.

So, there were some ham hash cakes for starters, topped with poached egg and hollandaise, studded with ruby chunks of salty hough in fresh, crunchy breadcrumb. The pan-fried crab and prawn cakes were very poor, though — small, sawdusty pucks with a bad case of marine amnesia.

Otherwise, the menus were full of interesting, off-the-beaten track stuff: baby squid with puy lentils, brown onion soup, oysters in horseradish bloody mary, kidney and bacon on toast, calf’s liver. Why any self-respecting restaurant descends to serve ostrich remains a mystery, though — it wasn’t even a good gimmick the first time round more than a decade ago.

For mains there were venison meatballs in a Paris brown mushroom ragout — the meatballs slightly dry in themselves, as venison generally is, but chivvied along by inventive accompaniments — and a super old-style steak and kidney pie that, again, would have benefited from a hand more flamboyant with the oil and gravy. None of it, however, was less than considered; there was flair in the choice of dishes and the service was superb. There’s also a kiln-roasted smoked salmon, just in case the council ever comes round to inspect.

The Shore, 3 The Shore, Edinburgh, 0131 553 5080, dinner for two with wine £65

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