Ian Rankin, the UK’s biggest-selling crime writer, uses his fictional police detective, John Rebus, to probe the underbelly of Edinburgh. So would he suggest we lunch on a pie and a pint of beer in the Oxford Bar, a real-life hostelry in Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town that is Inspector Rebus’s favourite retreat? Or are we heading for somewhere grittier?

Instead, Rankin picks La Garrigue, a fashionable restaurant in the Old Town area, with an award-winning French chef who specialises in the cuisine of his native Languedoc.