A few fine drams with Rabbie

It's just as well that Robert Burns wasn't born in August. Haggis with bashed neeps (swede) and champit tatties (mashed potatoes), washed down with a bonfire of drams, seems a neat idea on 25 January. Especially when the poet's birthday falls on a Friday, as it does this year, providing a Saturday recovery period. Summer nosh it ain't.

Burns Night Dinners are on the move, marching from the hame and the Scottish restaurant to the gastro-pub and even the themed outlet. Why? Two reasons. The first is that, in a world in which wine exists, we rarely allow ourselves the opportunity to drink nothing but whisky (which, watered, is actually a fine accompaniment to food).

The second is that, despite its scary list of ingredients, haggis is delicious. You'd never know you were eating sheep's lung and heart wrapped in stomach - thanks to the fact that these ingredients are usually buried inside an avalanche of oatmeal and pepper. Stabbing a freshly simmered one, and watching its insides spill out like the spleen of a crashtest dummy, is also disquietingly gratifying.

In order to get a wet run at a decent Burns Night dinner before the off, I visited Boisdale's. Owner Ranald Macdonald promises "a traffic jam of Burns Dinners" between the 24th and the 26th, with virtuoso piper Willy Cochran on hand and the staff (pleasant, well trained, and seeming to come from everywhere except Scotland) primed to recite. If you've ever wanted to hear Scottish dialect poetry declaimed by Poles or Arabs, hurry along, please.

The charge for the special five-course dinners is a most reasonable £39.50 per person (£44.44 including service). The haggis (from Macsween) will be individually portioned, though parties of eight can pre-order a whole one.

Since Boisdale's is most emphatically a Scottish restaurant, you can of course eat Macsween's haggis there year-round. Not only haggis, but all of the other fierce tributes of the North: Orkney herring, Rannoch Moor venison, Locharnan salmon (from South Uist) and Dunkeld wild smoked salmon. Lots of Scotch beef, too, with four cuts of steak, each garnished three ways, to choose from.

A guest and I partnered haggis with an un-Scottish but cleverly assembled salad of asparagus and green beans and a memorably glutinous Irish stew containing meltingly soft lamb. The haggis was soft-skinned and superb, though texturally it seems to cry out for something a little moister and sloppier than the sticky reduction it is served with, visually pleasing though this is.

And we drank, of course, nothing but malt. A Springbank 10-year-old to begin with, all heathery purity and sweet moss (46 per cent, £3.85 plus service for 2.5cl), followed by the darker, more brooding Longmorn 15-year-old (45 per cent, same price) and a rasping, smoky Port Ellen 1981 (40 per cent, £7.60) for a buffeting finish. (Take advantage of ghost drams like this while you can: the distillery has now been converted to a maltings.)

Boisdale's, I discovered, is a fine location to drink almost anything. I hoped for a large malt range; 180 to choose from comfortably exceeded expectation. There's a fascinating range of vintage port, too, including what must surely be the most spectacular bottle of anything on any London wine list: a Nebuchadnezzar (ie, 20 bottles' worth, or 15 litres, in one giant bottle) of Dow's 1896 vintage port, priced at £10,000 and requiring advance notice, for obvious reasons. This bottle of 19th century port is the size of a small, fat child, and the contents should be in excellent condition (the bigger the bottle, the more slowly wine ages).

Boisdale's also has a rangy, fairly priced wine list; every wine on it is informatively annotated. Combine all this with the fact that there are banks of Havanas to choose from and a smoking room to smoke them in, plus live jazz, and you can see that this is a place where you're best off leaving restraint in the taxi. Especially this Friday.