Whistle Binkies

During the Festival Whistle Binkies is open until 5am. During the rest of the year the pub is open until 3am. Thank you.

It’ll come as no surprise that Binkies is very popular with students. Wait a minute. Binkies is very popular with everyone. As a matter of fact, Whistle Binkies is one of the few pubs that employ Bouncers to deal with queues. I’ve seen plenty of clubs that have to manage the doors but only this pub. After ...
...to go.

Whistle Binkies is, as you’ve gathered, often very busy and it isn’t very large. The pub itself is on the foot of the Bridges, just before they meet with the Royal Mile. The main door isn’t very obvious and would be easy to miss (unless, that is, it is Friday night and people are queuing to get inside). They have a back door that you should be able to get into before midnight. I suggest that you do sneak around ... more

During the Festival Whistle Binkies is open until 5am. During the rest of the year the pub is open until 3am. Thank you.

It’ll come as no surprise that Binkies is very popular with students. Wait a minute. Binkies is very popular with everyone. As a matter of fact, Whistle Binkies is one of the few pubs that employ Bouncers to deal with queues. I’ve seen plenty of clubs that have to manage the doors but only this pub. After all, there are dozens and dozens of pubs in Edinburgh so there is always somewhere else to go.

Whistle Binkies is, as you’ve gathered, often very busy and it isn’t very large. The pub itself is on the foot of the Bridges, just before they meet with the Royal Mile. The main door isn’t very obvious and would be easy to miss (unless, that is, it is Friday night and people are queuing to get inside). They have a back door that you should be able to get into before midnight. I suggest that you do sneak around the back since it takes you into the pub a lot closer to the bar. You’ll get your drinks and then have to worry about finding a place to sit… or, as is often the case, a place to stand.

The pub is, pretty much, underground. You might find a table beside the bar that looks out onto the alleyway by the backdoor but I doubt you’ll be able to see much. When you enter the club via the front door the first think you have to do is trot down a steep flight of steps. You can prowl further into the depths of Whistle Binkies if you like since many of the tables are set into the little archway of rooms. I imagine that at one point these mini-rooms where the wine cellars of some plush house over head. Who knows, perhaps wild Jacobites or the morbid Burke and Hare hid down there at some point in the past. No one who suffers claustrophobic attacks has ever hidden done there though, and if you don’t like getting cosy or playing sardines then I strongly suggest that you restrict your visits to the off peak times.

Whistle Binkies is a pub in the heart of Edinburgh. It is popular with tourists and locals a like. Drinks will be expensive, but not in comparison to the nightclubs in the same area. Whistle Binkies does have a nice selection of drinks, which is always a bonus. The pub has something of an “Irish Bar” reputation to it, I suppose the name could bring that connotation, and if the resulting effect is their determination to stock a good collection of spirits as well as beer and cider then I’m not going to complain.

The music in Whistle Binkies is something else. The pub goes to the effort to keep a steady supply of live bands performing in the pub. I guess it must be a successful tactic for them because they wouldn’t do it otherwise. I find it annoying though. When you’re in search of a chair it can be annoying to see just how much space is reserved for a band which aren’t on stage yet or who seem to have been warming up for the last three hundred and eight-six hours. The choice of music is also an interesting one. You might expect them to stick with a diet of folky Irish or Scots sounds, however, on a rather frequent basis the choice of sound seems to be some sort of “Jungle-Folk”. It is hard to describe. Drums, lots of drums but with the more familiar acoustic sound of a folk singer. Weird.

The mixed crowd at Whistle Binkies is both a blessing and a curse. You can meet some interesting people there. It is likely that some of your current circle of friends will be happy to go there, if not all of them. You can also dump into total twits there - drunks seem to be a problem. In fact, there was a death just outside Binkies a few years ago. The papers reported the story as the Whistle Binkie Bouncers tossing out some drunk student who had passed out in the loos. They left him lying on the pavement outside. He choked on his own vomit and drowned. That sounds like an Urban Myth, I know, but is true. Whistle Binkies ran the risk of being shut down as a result, however, the papers reported that they escaped with a suspended license instead. I’m not entirely sure what a “Suspended License” involves but as far as I know the place seemed to carry on as usual.

Oh, about the loos then. Well, like the toilets of most popular and underground (literally!) the loos can be rather grubby. I think Binkies do make the effort to keep them as clean as possible though. The walls are covered in age-old posters and postcards from Edinburgh back in the, er, 20s? At least, that’s the impression I get. Lots of pubs seem to have found a copy of the old “Guinness is good for you” so imagine that sort of style and you’ll be on the right lines.

So, are the queues and weird music worth it?

Nope. Not if you ask me. I quickly grew fed up with the atmosphere of the place and the hassle of finding somewhere to breathe. Really, though, the reason why it’s not really worth bothering with Binkies is that there are other pubs nearby which are just as good, if not better. That said, Binkies does have this super-night license which can be really handy at times.
 

...less