Moonfish Café, Aberdeen: “A menu that will please everyone” – restaurant review

Moonfish Cafe, 9 Fix Wynd, Aberdeen AB10 1HP. Lunch starters £9.95-£10.95, mains £14.95, desserts £8.50, two course dinner £30, three course £38, wines from £22 ="dcr-18sg7f2">In the oldest of cities, the dead are never far from the living. Here at the Moonfish Café in Aberdeen, the view, across a narrow, cobbled lane, is of the 12th-century Kirk of St Nicholas, a moody edifice in the city's familiar palette of wintry grays. It is surrounded on three sides by a cemetery full of those who built this city: men of God and men of Mammon and politicians, and they are mostly men. Among this monochromatic scheme of moral rectitude is a flash of color: the tomb of a certain John Henry Anderson, a 19th-century magician dubbed the Great Wizard of the North by Sir Walter Scott.

Anderson had many claims to fame. He perfected the ball grip and spent much of his later years to expose the growing armies of spiritists and psychics who preyed on the vulnerable and the desperate. Better yet, he is credited in some quarters - I won't be definitive, the world of stage magic is torn with claims and counterclaims - for being the first magician to pull a rabbit out of a hat during a stage number.

This writer will be forgiven, I hope, for see it all as an analogy just waiting to happen, because the best restaurant meals are really like a bunch of happy bunnies pulled from the hats. ows that wait; of revelations and merriment and entertainment. On a day when the color of the sky matches that of the Aberdonian granite, that's just the thing. The Moonfish Café, which opened in 2004, has it all. It's a simple, square piece with little beige wood paneling and warm, hanging light globes. For decoration, there are some artificial privet globes which might look silly but no. Granted, the heaters aren't on here today, even though it's only 10°C outside. Again, it's Aberdeen in September. I suspect they don't hold up with central heating until you can scratch your initials in the frost inside the window.