Mother India Café
3-5 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh
0131 524 9801
Lunch/Dinner: £11-£22
Food rating: 8/10
I HAVE a soft spot for Mother India Cafe in Edinburgh. It has become "our place" for me and my old friend. We meet about once a month. Every now and then we feel obliged to try some new place. Invariably when one of us says, “Shall we just go to Mother India”, the other promptly says yes.
Before we even get to the food Mother India has several winning attributes. It is one of the very few restaurants in Edinburgh that genuinely has a thriving lunchtime business. It isn’t just going through the ritual of appearing open while the B team staffs the kitchen.
The people who serve you are generally charming, polite, and perceptive. They’ll spot a customer who would appreciate a steadying hand while walking down the stairs. They can be funny too. Once I arrived carrying a birthday bouquet for my friend to be greeted by the manager: “For me? You’re too kind!”
Decor is winningly haphazard, like a much-stamped passport documenting the history of its owner. The ceiling, clad in embossed, leather-effect wallpaper, suggests it was once a pub. Some walls are lined with proper old curry house-style flock wallpaper; others with a mishmash of ceramics redolent of a tile store. Reproduction Parisian brasserie lights clash with the photographic portraits of people involved in the Mother India enterprise and go with absolutely nothing else in the space. Physically, Cafe India is a rag bag, yet it is one of the most consistently popular restaurants in the capital. Why?
It has three hugely attractive characteristics. It’s always warm – a basic animal requirement you can never underestimate in Scotland. Popularity gives it a buzz. A thriving restaurant exudes a powerful intoxicant that energises staff and enthuses customers. The food, of course, is, in my experience, as reliable as any sub-continental eating experience you’ll get these days in Edinburgh, now that Ajay and Neera Bhartwaj have retired from the Kalpna. For my money, it’s more like home than restaurant cooking, and I mean that as a compliment.
The food here always tastes fresh, as though prepared in one continuous time frame, not cobbled together from pre-prepared components. You can rely on meat being tender and fish being fresh. Whole spices are discernible and dishes have an individuality to them that suggests the use of custom-made spice blends, not cash and carry cooking pastes. The chefs must chop a field of coriander each day, hence the veil of greenness that freshens so many of their dishes.
I find it hard to visit Mother India without choosing the whole baked spiced haddock. This juicy fillet electrified by its Punjabi spice marinade, whacked in a blisteringly hot oven, makes a really nutritious, and totally satisfying lunch. But we never stop there. In a comfort food frame of mind there’s the lure of minced lamb and peas cooked with earthy fenugreek. Lamb saag (spinach) is another old favourite; the meat has the yielding firmness and close knit texture I associate with good mutton. It has intrinsic flavour too.
Normally I avoid samosas. Too often they consist of old potato mush in greasy casing. Mother India’s are the acme of samosa-dom. I suspect that their addictively crunchy, flaky pastry is predicated on ghee, once unfairly demonised as a heart-stopper. Give me this golden clarified butter over refined vegetable oil any day.
I’m partial to the texture of the daal mahkni, the way each black lentil retains holds it satiny shape, although that said, I think that Dishoom’s is better. I’m also ever so slightly disgruntled that Mother India dropped from its menu a lamb dish scented with smoked cloves, but I’ll find refuge in another regular winner: dry-fried okra with fresh tomatoes.
I draw the line at blue ice cream that’s bought in, and otherwise, Mother India does only one homemade dessert: warm, light, syrup-bathed gulab jamun. The talented food writer Sumayya Usmani is just about to publish a glorious volume on Pakistan’s sweet cooking, Mountain Berries And Desert Spice. Mother India could do with her services as a consultant. That would be the icing on the cake, so to speak.
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