Morten Andersen has sat through enough hotel pianists to mistrust the phrase "piano bar." Fingers, down a stair off Frederick Street, is the rare one that earns it: a small room where the player takes requests and the whole bar sings them back.
The bar sits at 61A Frederick Street, a basement room a short walk north of Princes Street in Edinburgh's New Town. It has traded for more than 25 years on the same simple format, which is a live pianist, a crowd that wants to sing, and a late licence that runs to 3am (The Skinny). Entry is free, which in a city of cover charges is half the appeal.
The room is low-ceilinged and close, built around the piano rather than around a wall of spirits. There is no stage in the theatrical sense; the pianist works a few feet from the front tables and reads the room as the night runs on. It fills late and it fills with a mixed crowd, students and stags and couples in their sixties sharing the same chorus, which is not something most Edinburgh bars manage. The walls are plain, the seating is close, and the sightline to the keyboard is the whole design brief. A regular pianist will read a slow Tuesday differently from a packed Saturday, holding the standards back until the room is ready to carry them, and that judgement is the craft the place runs on.
The drinks are a late-night spirits-and-pints list rather than a serious cellar, and they are priced for a 2am venue. Order a pint or a dram, settle near the piano, and accept that the point here is the music and the singing, not the wine list. The standards come round on rotation, the Billy Joel and the Journey and the Beatles that a request bar lives on, and the pianist will take a name from the floor and play it if the room is willing (EdinburghGuide).
Who it is for is the group that wants to end a night singing rather than queuing for a club. Birthdays, leaving dos, and visitors after a Scottish night out all land well here. For the same end-of-evening energy with a sporting bent instead, our roundup of the best sports bars in Edinburgh covers the late rooms that keep the screens on, and the wider Edinburgh live music guide sets Fingers against the city's other late stages.
Best time to go is after 11pm on a Friday or Saturday, when the room has filled and the singalong has built its own momentum. Arrive early in the evening and it can feel quiet, because Fingers is a place that switches on once the rest of the New Town is closing. Weeknights are gentler and easier on the ears if you want to actually hear the player rather than the crowd.
The thing that keeps Fingers honest is that it has never tried to be anything cleverer than a piano and a room that sings. Edinburgh has gained and lost a dozen late bars in the time this one has run, and it survives on word of mouth and a loyal trade rather than reinvention. There is no food, no dance floor, no theme; there is a pianist, a microphone passed to anyone brave enough, and a closing time most rivals cannot match.
For a homesick visitor or a local at the end of a long night, that plainness is the draw. Fingers earns its place in this guide as Edinburgh's most durable singalong bar, free at the door and open later than almost anything around it. For a broader tour of the city, start with our Edinburgh bar guide.
Sources: The Skinny venue listing; EdinburghGuide; Fingers Piano Bar official Facebook.
