Ka Pao

St James Quarter, Edinburgh, EH1 3AE
Tel: 0131 385 1040
Internet: www.ka-pao.com
GPS: 55.954723, -3.188805

The tannoy crackled into life, and a disembodied voice delivered the unwanted message.

“ScotRail regrets to inform you that the 18:03 to Edinburgh Waverley has been cancelled due to a fault on the train. The next service to Edinburgh will be the 18:37, calling at Brunstane, and Edinburgh Waverley.”

This was really annoying, but there was nothing we could do. I pulled out my smartphone, brought up the website for Ka Pao and jabbed at the telephone number. Two rings and it was answered. I offered my apologies; we were going to be fifteen minutes late for our reservation. No problem, I will make a note you might be late, see you soon, came the reassuring reply, before the line clicked dead.

It seemed like overkill. After all, surely this is unfussy, South Asian, spice-and-beer, bistro-level dining, I told myself, not The Fat Duck or 68 Royal Hospital Road. Nevertheless, it seemed like the polite and right course of action. We caught the 18:37 train and arrived at Ka Pao exactly sixteen minutes late, to be shown to our table; the only unoccupied table in an expansive dining room absolutely buzzing with diners. No seat went without a bum – but they had held our table.

Sometimes it is best to do the right thing.

Ka Pao is part of a huge, global chain of restaurants. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration; this is restaurant number two for Ka Pao, which is in the ownership of Scoop Restaurants, which is the business of Jonathan MacDonald. As a wee bairn (I’m trying to use more of the local tongue) he chalked up some work experience in a couple of Scotland’s top restaurants, before he ended up working as a globe-trotting chef with a high-end events company. It was on his travels that he encountered the cuisines of Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia, all of which have been sucked into the borderless menu of Ka Pao.

The menu at Ka Pao is a smorgasbord (that’s Vietnamese for ‘endless bounty’) of delights. With five of us sitting down to dinner we opted for the sharing menu (minimum of four diners) plus a couple of extra vegetarian dishes, and we were soon swamped in a slowly rolling avalanche of small plates, a dozen dishes all told, fourteen with our extra choices. Readers, sit back and relax, perhaps with a glass of teh tarik in hand, because there wasn’t a single dish which does not deserve at least some mention.

Among the most arresting of our choices were the (vegetarian) salt and Szechuan pepper oyster mushrooms with pickled mooli, the mushrooms lightly dehydrated, coated in a deliriously flavoursome spice dust which is surely the inspiration for Frank Herbert’s melange (yes, I know the novels were written decades ago), and while the dipping sauce tasted of soy more than mooli, this could not detract from the addictive nature of this dish. I would have eaten all of them, although I might have been beaten up by our resident vegetarian, so I resisted. Also wonderful, but also genuinely novel, were the corn ribs with salted coconut, shrimp and lime. Whole cobs of corn, sliced lengthways into quarters, smothered in spicy lime, shrimp and coconut sauce and then chargrilled. If this doesn’t appeal you need a tastebud transplant. There is also a shrimp-less vegetarian version, which was probably just as good. I can’t say for sure, as it was too closely guarded.

Two fish courses which arrived early during the course of our feast were the cured stone bass with peach, cashews and green nam jim, the latter a sauce of green chilies, lime, sugar, fish sauce, and presumably – because it kept popping up on my palate – a little mint too. The texture of the cured fish was spot on, and the flavour combinations worked much better than you might imagine. Somewhat more orthodox was the combination of king prawns, pomegranate, shredded cabbage, lime leaf and lemon grass, safer but no less salubrious, and providing a fragrant and welcome reprieve from some of the more spicy dishes served alongside.

While on a fishy theme, the first dish out of the kitchen was an arbroath smokie miang, the fish mixed with gingery galangal and peanuts, and ready for wrapping in jade green spinach leaves. Grilled mackerel, pak choi and burnt tomato sambal was the least inspiring of all the fish dishes served, two fillets of mackerel resting on a spicy tomato paste, and this was one of the few dishes where the platter was not licked clean.

A few other dishes were also delicious, albeit not at the same level as those above. The pork and bone marrow sausage with coriander and shallot were a little dry and grainy, but they carried a powerful kick of spice. Stir-fried ox tongue, pak choi, oyster sauce and green peppercorns did exactly what it said on the tin, an easy-going and flavoursome stir fry dish, and the melting nature of the ox tongue was well received by all (The Cellar in Anstruther does it better though – and so it should). A green curry of lamb shoulder, broad beans, pea and banana chilli was rich and meaty, filled with some rather mutton-esque lamb (I guess some would see this as a good thing), while chicken leg, ratte potato, smoked grape and peanut massaman curry was flavoursome and packed with heat. The cucumber salad with chilli, lime and peanuts provided a great foil for all this warmth, and it showed the value of choosing a set menu as this is a dish I would almost certainly otherwise not have chosen, yet it provided a fresh, fragrant and acid-fresh counterbalance to all these generously spiced dishes.

The wine list at Ka Pao carries little of interest, a brief selection of on-trade specialties, although it does have a few laudable features, including modest mark-ups (compared to retail prices) and correspondingly accessible pricing, and I liked the fact that all but two bins were available by the 175 ml glass or in 500 ml carafe. Hidden among the sparkling wines, however, there were a couple of curiosities, one of which I could not resist, this being the 2019 Yew Tree Vineyard ‘GMF’ Seyval Blanc (not to be confused with Sauvignon Blanc – easily done I guess) from Black Book, an urban London winery. Taking fruit from Oxfordshire, this is a méthode ancestrale style made by winemaker Sergio Verrillo. It works as a good foil for spicy and aromatic foods, and worked well with most dishes here, except for the most richly spiced such as the lamb green curry. The only problem, of course, was that once my fellow diners had drained their beers and cocktails, I had to share it. Life isn’t always perfect, I guess.

But at least the train taking me home wasn’t cancelled. Now that would have been really annoying, even more so than having to share my sparkling Seyval.

Price: The sharing menu (for a minimum of four diners) was £30.50 per head, while the extra vegetarian dishes were £7 and £7.50. The Black Book fizz was £55 per bottle. After additional beers and cocktails (what can I say, some people like drinking chilli passionfruit fizz) the bill came to £252.50 for five diners, £277.42 including an optional 10% gratuity. (27/10/23)