"The Newsroom is one of Edinburgh's best bars. You'll not only drink a lot, you'll learn a lot. The trick is remembering it all in the morning.".....
More informative than your average red top rag, The Newsroom's drinks list is like an encyclopedia of drinking. Get ready to do some serious studying.
The Venue
The Newsroom is fashionably dark with grey walls and dim lights setting the atmosphere for a cool cocktail venue. The furnishings are rather simple but effective with a few booths, couches and a back area raised a couple of steps from the rest of the bar.
The bottles behind the bar make an impressive display of themselves placed above a light box and the colour morphs from white into purple or green. The colour also changes in the lights at the base of the bar counter as well so expect a mood change induced by white, purple or green light as the time goes on.
The People
Only formal shirts and stilettos? Not really. The Newsroom looks upmarket enough to discourage completely casual attire but, given the laid back friendliness of the place, you'll see lots of men in simple simple t-shirts.
Despite the youthful dance and house tunes during the weekends you get a mixture of ages, and people prefer crowding the bar rather than sitting down so there are plenty of mingling opportunities.
The Food
With a tapas list and a dining menu, your stop at The Newsroom doesn’t need to be for just drinks. Choose one small dish for £3.75 or pick up to four for a reduced price. There's baby Thai vegetable broth, a 4oz mini burger, a mini bowl of mussels plus many more. Full meal options include haricot bean, lemon thyme and camembert pate on ciabatta toast for £5 or falafel burger for £7.50 and Indian chicken salad for £7.25.
The Drink
The drinks list at The Newsroom is more informative than Wikipedia. It has history and trivia as well as the all important cocktail ingredients. They even have a map to teach you where all their various whiskies came from. Whoever compiled it must have spent a long and drunken time researching the virtues of the Cosmopolitan. After reading through this tome you'll feel ready to take an exam in the history of cocktails and the composition of wine.
Cocktails cost between £5.50 to £6.50. You can choose between Headlines, Tall Tales, Short Stories or Cocktail Small Ads which are basically a spirit with a simple, but unusual mixer. Their range spans classics, twisted classics and house concoctions. The Passionberry Fizz is made from gin, fresh strawberries, Passoa, passion fruit puree, lemon juice, sugar syrup, Appletiser and it's one of The Newsroom signatures worth trying. If you go for a Cocktail Small Ad, which cost between £5.50 and £17.50, you won't forget the strong and pure punch of a Rock Steady which mixes Patron Anejo tequila with fresh lime juice.
If you are more of a wine drinker, there are over a dozen bottles available priced between £10.50 and £20 a bottle and glasses, large and small, are around £3 to £5. The beer department is also well stocked especially within the bottles with Erdinger, Krusovice, Tsingtao and many others.
The Last Word
The Newsroom is one of Edinburgh's best bars. You'll not only drink a lot, you'll learn a lot. The trick is remembering it all in the morning.
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