Restaurant

Gaby Soutar visits Lancers Brasserie, Edinburgh

Where? 5 Hamilton Place, Edinburgh (0131-315 4335, www. lancersbrasserie.co.uk)

It took me a while to work out how you’d train a horse to trot backwards.

Copious oats, Polo mints and carrots? Would you steer using its tail? Say Pu-yddig?

Yes, sometimes the Soutars are slow on the uptake, since my sister had the same thoughts.

Luckily, on the Lancers Brasserie website, alongside the blurb that had confused our minuscule brains, there’s an illustration of Abdhul Samad Choudhury, the grandfather of this place’s executive chef, Bodral Hussein. He’s not on some moonwalking Lippizaner, but sitting on an ordinary horse back-to-front, with ladles strung from his belt.

Apparently, he was a pacifist who, I suppose, protested by riding into battle like this. Thus, he eventually ditched the frontline and became a cook in one of the British Army regiments of the Bengal Lancers instead.

His grandson opened this Stockbridge stalwart way back in the 1985 and, to celebrate their 33rd birthday, they’ve metaphorically taken out their shoulder pads and ripped off the ra-ra skirt like Bucks Fizz’s Cheryl.

The major refurb has resulted in something that’s quite Dishoom-y, though even smarter. Along with tile flooring and round marble tables, there are beautiful velvet banquettes in peacock blue, low slung globe lights as well as rose gold cutlery and floral plates.

Drink lots of water, so you can regularly visit the bumper-sized containers of Aesop hand lotion and free chocolates in the downstairs powder room. So fancy.

In tribute to their new styling and the downsized menu, we went for the modern Mumbai street food option of king prawn tacos (£7.95) from the à la carte (there isn’t a lunch menu as such).

It would’ve been nice if this option had featured proper corny tortillas, but unfortunately they’d gone for bready cups that were more like strawberry punnets than actual tacos. Still, the filling, with loads of chunky prawns, red pepper and coriander in a clingy and tomatoey sweet gravy was pleasant.

Our more old school option of keema samosas (£5.95) was a decent rendition, with two palominocoloured equilateral triangles packed with an earthy mulch of minced lamb and peas. It’s a shame there was no tamarind chutney, as billed.

Something was also lacking when it came to my Lahori lamb burger (£11.95), which was housed in a griddle lined bun. The masala fries were just naked bog-standard skinny fries, and the robust and craggy minced lamb patty, though hot and charred on the outside, only had a mean dab of the curry mayo on the inside of the bun. It really needed a giant blob of that, or something else to lubricate the protein.

When it came to our Handi Se (served in a metal cooking pot) option, despite the fact that eating the cubes of meat in the goat sooka (£13.95) became a game of gristle roulette that we just kept on losing, the sauce was rich, elemental and garlicky, perfect for mopping with the oven-glove-sized peshwari naan (£3.25).

With its topping of crispy onions, our chicken biryani was (£13.95) another dry offering, with a massive heap of orange and lemon coloured pilau rice, chopped coriander, dense chunks of chook and not much else. It became a bit like a cream cracker eating contest, until we told them that we needed the cucumber raita that was billed.

We’d gone slightly overboard by ordering two pilau rice (£3.45), since we didn’t even manage to get through one of their generous bowl-fuls.

For pudding, they were out of mango sorbet (£3.95), so we went for the gulab jamun instead (£5.45). It was a low-on-syrup, but plump and fluffy take, with vanilla ice-cream on the side. We’d also been a bit basic and gone for the Nutella cheesecake (£4.95). No regrets. It wasn’t much of a cheesecake, but more of a traybake, with an inch thick slick of every squirrel’s favourite toast topping.

Not a bad ending to a meal that was good in parts, but slightly lacking in direction (a bit, I suppose, like a moonwalking horse).