3 Royal Terrace, Edinburgh; 0845 222 1212. Tue-Sat, lunch, noon-1.45pm; dinner, 7pm-9.30pm

Five stars Helen Four stars Antigone Three stars Lysistrata Two stars Medea One star Clytemnestra

Edinburgh. The most perfect city on earth. I will brook no argument about this. You can squabble the toss over the grandeur of Rome versus the panache of Paris. You can square the panoramas of Venice against the vistas of Udaipur. Fight to the death for Tirana over Cardiff. But Edinburgh, city of my birth and my heart, is the finest, most humane, reasonable, amusing, civilised and eloquently lovely civic construction in all 10,000 years of human cohabitation. There is one teeny caveat, so small it barely needs mentioning, a whispered “but”, but ... like Paris and Rome, and possibly Cardiff, Edinburgh is a city that — how shall I put this? — is inhabited by people who don’t quite manage to live up to their environment. You always get the feeling that Edinburgh is let down by the human component: the burghers of the burgh sadly behave as if they lived in Cheltenham. And, indeed, most of them would be far happier if they did. Against this elegant, civilised backdrop of peerless invention and imagination, the intellectual currency is complaint. Edinburghers have been complaining so long and viciously they’ve developed a specific accent that is the sing-song evocation of complaining. They’ve managed to set complaining to music: whatever you say in old Reeky's argot (think of Jean Brodie and Gordon Jackson), it is instantly, unmissably, the polite ululation of disappointment stoically endured, and bad news passed on with veiled delight. No neighbours so deserve the appellation “McSchadenfreudes” as Edinburghers. I’ve always imagined that this sublime city could transcend the incessant carping of its inhabitants and hover above them with a celestial insouciance.

And then I went back for the festival. I got out of Waverley station, and the taxi driver said, in that familiar tone, that he wouldn’t himself be attending any functions, performances, exhibitions or alfresco juggling events. This has always been the most universally popular complaint in the city: that you won’t be seen dead at any of those tacky and tasteless circuses that are attracting quite the wrong tenor and type of folk, and continue to insist that the festival is the work of philistines, mountebanks and homosexuals.

After I’d listened to this indigenous riff for 15 minutes, I noticed we were still on the ramp outside the station. I asked what the hold-up was. “Roadworks. Princes Street is all dug up.” Roadworks is too familiar and colloquial a term for what they’ve done to Edinburgh. Finally, the natives have dragged the city down to their wizened size. They’ve incapacitated it like Lilliputians, by excavating miles and miles, digging a vacant Somme of trenches, as if to make their complaining natures visible. The roadworks of Edinburgh are a vast, shambolic, dystopian Richard Long installation, memorialising the great complaint of Edinburgh: the city of reason has been made mad; the city of medicine crippled; the city of law rendered chaotic; the city of theology hellish. Well done all of you. Like the twa blethering bessoms of Macbeth, your premonitions and predictions have untimely ripped ugliness from the womb of beauty.

I was up here to see my daughter Flora’s play at the festival. She was Jocasta in Oedipus. An awkward part on so many levels. They did quite well, as the average Fringe audience is six; they were attracting 50 or 60 for each matinée, and she was captivating, having learnt that most elusive and winning of theatrical skills: stillness. It’s never acceptable to boast about your children to strangers, except, by happy chance, in Edinburgh, where it’s de rigueur. Flora and her brother, their mother and I and a handful of friends all had dinner in Kweilin Chinese restaurant on Northumberland Street, where, when it was still black and white, I was born. It was the nicest, most memorable meal I’ve had all year; I don’t know how much longer these children, poised on the edge of their own lives, will want to have supper with their father. When people ask me what makes a great restaurant, I always forget to tell them it’s the company you take, and for a couple of hours on a Wednesday evening, that Chinese restaurant was the best restaurant in Scotland.

Edinburgh restaurants are like the Black Watch that guard the castle. Tenacious bruisers who don’t know the meaning of the word “retreat” or the expression, “Why don’t we go somewhere where they like us?” Every time I come here, there’s a new, bright chef trying to convert the ungrateful, soor-visaged locals to the choicer aspects of sophisticated dining. It’s not the snobbery or pretension that the locals baulk at — snobbery and pretension being their specialist subjects — it’s the paying. They mind. They think that anyone who charges £10 for a chicken tit is taking the pish. The latest hopeful wanting to pit its gastronomic erudition against Morningside’s raised pinkie is 21212, which, right at the start, is annoying enough to make you want to puke shrapnel. What is that? It’s not memorable. It’s not funny. It’s a number for car insurance or a Gambian sex line.

As we sat down, the waiter said: “I expect you’ve been told what our name stands for.” I don’t know. Windscreen replacement? Hand-job assistance? He chuckled. “It’s how you choose your dinner. Some courses you have a choice of two, others we give you.” So that’s your concept? Just when the rest of the gastronomically civilised world is giving up concepts like salmonella and going back to serving food, you’ve decided to invent one that’s like voting in The X Factor.

The room, which is in a bijou hotel on one of Edinburgh’s peerless Georgian crescents, is swag-stuffed and overdecorated to within an inch of its face-lift, which the natives will like. They do like to see where all the money’s gone, so they can suck their teeth at where all the money’s gone. The menu is five courses. The first choice was smoked salmon nugget, parsnip confit, assiette of apples, goat’s cheese and creamy shellfish, or white asparagus, bayonne ham, chicken, white pudding, peas, barley, sweet potato and yoghurt sauce. Now, I defy any of you to make an informed choice. Close your eyes and try to make up that taste. It’s like a Glyndebourne-picnic car crash. When it came, the ham and asparagus combo was really very good. I took Emma Hawkins, the great taxidermy and curio impresario, and she rather liked her nuggety bisque. After some soup, the choice was between gloucester old spot, celeriac confit, couscous, bacon, black pudding, walnut, morelles, sage and madeira cream — which was rather more coherent, but still, too many variations on pig — or halibut, cabbage, macadamia nuts, artichokes, watercress, mangetout and pink peppercorn sauce, which comes from the Salvador Dali cookbook. I really did think I’d never see pink peppercorns again, but the chef managed to juggle something that tasted really very special.

The menu cost £60. In London, it would be good value; up here, they’d probably have to have feathers burnt under their noses. If you drink the wines they recommend, it would probably add another £30. The room was whisperingly studious, in the manner of fine dining, and was made up mostly of festival visitors, rather overwhelmed.

I expect they thought that they were going to get haggis-stuffed tomatoes, aberdeen angus and whisky. This is not a good restaurant. It is not a good concept. And it is not a good menu. But it is good food, made by a good chef. He just needs to untangle his desire to impress from his talent to cook. He needs to be less Bacchae, more Antigone; less mayhem and more hard choices.

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