The height of good taste

Appearances can be deceptive, and nowhere more so than at Suruchi, Edinburgh’s hardest-working Indian restaurant. I hesitate to call it a curry house, because that implies nothing more than an après-pint place to stuff your face rather than a venue offering a gateway to the multitude of cooking styles to be found on the sub-continent. But I digress: we’ll deal with the food in a moment.

Suruchi (‘good taste’ in Sanskrit) has another spacious offshoot in Leith, but the mother lode is reached by heading up a small set of stairs off Nicholson Street, opposite the Festival Theatre. I would call the stairway dingy - normally I’d imagine a climb like that would lead you to a back-street bookie or a massage parlour - but thanks to the brightest stair lights this side of Guantanamo Bay, there’s nothing dreary about the ascent to Suruchi.

The first thing we noticed once inside was the fact that virtually all the other diners were Indian. This is what reviewers call A Good Thing, implying as it does a touch of authenticity and value. Suitably impressed, we settled down to study the menu. The authentic aspect quickly disappeared as we realised that the menu was written in a curiously colloquial Scots of a sort you’d only hear from an Urdu-speaker who’d grown up on Maryhill Road. Nice idea, but I couldn’t help wondering how the poor Americans who proliferate in this part of town would cope.

Fortunately for us, Suruchi regularly holds food festivals, where they pick a theme and run a parallel menu, this time in English. It was recently dedicated to fish, a staple of the southern third of the country, while next month will feature a celebration of the different dishes eaten at the festival of Divali. And then comes the Christmas special, this time with a special emphasis on the food of Goa, the part of the country which gets the most excited about Yuletide festivities.

We asked if we could mix and match the orthodox menu with the fish menu, and decided to leave the decision as to what to eat to our waiter. Ten minutes, six popadoms, a plate of extraordinarily tangy lime chutney and two Cobra beers later, eight steaming dishes turned up on our table. The first four were individual plates containing a mixture of fish and bites: tandoori salmon, red snapper, vegetable pakora, vegetable haggis fritters. Alongside that sat the monkfish malabar, which is prepared with coconut milk, black pepper and garam masala. Next came the dakshni murgh, a lamb dish with aniseed and a creamy coconut base, followed by butter chicken, for those of a more sensitive disposition and puny palate. All of which was rounded off with a dish of coconut rice with mustard seeds and spiced vegetables, plus garlic naan and besan roti - a flat unleavened bread made from chickpeas, lentils and cumin.

It’s fair to say that Vicky was faintly appalled by our waiter’s decisions. She has a virtually pathological hatred of coconut, especially the sort of desiccated coconut which seemed to litter every dish. Michael and I weren’t complaining: it simply meant more for us, and we made the most of it.

We all tucked in to our dishes of fish, and although the salmon tandoori was probably a touch overcooked, the red snapper was glorious. After that, the monkfish was first to disappear, and was by common consent the best of the bunch. It may be difficult to really appreciate the subtle flavours of the fish, but the texture was perfect for the mix of masala and coconut. Vicky tried (unsuccessfully) to corral the only coconut-free main dish, the butter chicken, while Michael and I made short work of the dakshni murgh.

Balbir, the best Indian chef I have ever come across, once told me that an Indian meal shouldn’t leave you bloated, and that if it did it was because ghee had been used too liberally. By the time we hit the pudding menu, Michael and I couldn’t tell whether we were both feeling a little heavy because we’d just consumed the whole subcontinent’s ghee reserves or because we’d sampled half the restaurant’s menu. Either way, we had just about enough strength to order a selection of puddings, of which the mango ice-cream was by far the best. Vicky, needless to say, left the coconut ice-cream.

The verdict? A considerable cut above your run-of-the-mill Indian restaurant, but go easy on the ghee and coconut, please.

Vital statistics

Suruchi, 14a Nicholson Street, Edinburgh (0131 556 6583)

Out of pocket

Starters 3-5.50 Main courses 7.50-13 Naan bread and rice 2-3 Pudding 3.50