The Abbotsford Bar& Restaurant

The Abbotsford is one of Edinburgh's great Edwardian bars — built in 1902 for the staff and customers of Jenner's department store, and dominated by a magnificent mahogany island bar that has stood at its centre ever since. Its interior is on CAMRA's National Inventory with the top three-star grade, a room 'of outstanding national historic importance', and it has been owned since 2006 by the Stewart family, an Edinburgh licensed trade going back over a century and four generations, who also keep the Guildford Arms and the Cumberland Bar. On Rose Street, in the thick of the New Town, it pours good beer under a moulded plaster ceiling. A family-owned pub with a genuinely historic interior — rarer than it should be.