Kalpna — Restaurant in City of Edinburgh

This was one of the very worst meals I have ever eaten. Kalpna describes itself as a Vegetarian Restaurant serving traditional Indian food, which most people would assume would include curries with all the flavour associated with this dish - but not at this restaurant. This restaurant is for people who don't like vegetables or curries. I booked for pre-theatre dinner and we ordered a bottle of Italian Pinot Grigio (as described on the menu) but what arrived was a bottle of Californian Gallo Pinot Grigio, £6 from Asda but just under £20 here. We ordered the Pakora as a starter, described on the menu as "Vegetables dipped in a spiced batter and deep-fried served with a tamarind-date sauce". What we received was 4 small pakora like items that were lukewarm and contained not fresh vegetables but some kind of unidentifiable paste. Alongside were 4 fritter-like things which looked like they should have a filling but, again, no vegetable filling to be found ( though at least these were hot). The tamarind sauce was a drizzle on either side of the serving dish. Hmmm, barely worth the menu mention. Moving on to the mains, the waiter arrived with our plates which were not just cold to the touch but felt as if they had been stored in a fridge. We asked for them to be warmed, so they arrived back minutes later a little less chilly. We had ordered Dum Aloo Kashmiri, described as potato barrels filled with vegetables , cheese, nuts and served on a sauce including tomato, honey, ginger, almond and saffron; and Saam Savera, fresh spinach stuffed with various things. Both dishes arrived, two lumps of dense ...... something. I did identify a pea in the Dum Aloo, and I could see the spinach on the Saam Savera, but the vegetables felt destroyed and reconstituted into a generally unidentifiable mass. The spinach was bitter and unpleasant. The sauce on each dish was the consistency and blandness of baby food. The dishes boasted ginger as an ingredient but there was no hint of it in the taste. There appeared to have been no seasoning or spice used in the cooking, and as I have said, any vegetable involvement had been thoroughly disguised. The food was thoroughly bland and unpleasant. The coconut rice was nice (and at nearly £5 for the portion it should have been) and the plain Naan was good. The poppadoms might have been good(our neighbours' looked good and included the usual dishes of chutneys) but the waiter, who took our order without writing anything down, didn't bring us our poppadoms.

The restaurant only accepts cash payment, an important detail not mentioned on their website or told to us until it came time to pay. A handwritten sign saying cash payment only had been blutacked to a wall, but the blutak hadn't held at the top and the sign had flopped forward, rendering it unreadable. Staff hadn't fixed the problem.

Maybe it has its fans but this restaurant didn't work for me, I prefer flavour in my...

Kalpna has always been my absolute favourite place to eat in Edinburgh. I went for a birthday treat dinner this evening and find it hard to review because the staff were trying so very hard, and were friendly and helpful but just had to manage too many covers with too few staff or at least no proper system evident . We had booked a table for 2 and they had our booking in the list and yet the waiter had to go and find an extra plastic table and 2 chairs for us and then set it up while we stood there. The restaurant had several large parties in and I'd say was struggling to get food to them all efficiently so some were finished while others were just being served. The food itself was previously outstanding. While you couldn't complain about the food we had tonight, it just wasn't of the same standard as before. At the end of the meal my husband asked for a coffee from the menu and was told they weren't doing coffee. He asked what alternative there might be and was told none. The restaurant has been refurbished to make more space but it's also now very very noisy and it was hard to hear each other or the table staff. They need to get some sound deafening on the ceiling to fix that. The whole impression was of an establishment that had changed from exceptional food with smooth professional service, to nice food with enthusiastic amateur service. Was it just a super-busy night? I'd like to think I'd have a more enjoyable experience on...

We went into Kaplana with great hopes but came out extremely disappointed. Not only the food was well below average, the customer service was abysmal. We ordered Mysore Masala Dosa & Butter Masala Dosa. The order took forever to arrive and when it did, it was plain Masala Dosa instead of the Butter one I had ordered on good authority from a South Indian friend. Which would frankly not have been an issue. The issue was that they brought back the same Dosa with a bit of Butter lathered on it and figured we will not notice. When my friend requested them to change the coconut chutney because it tasted like sour coconut milk and quite frankly like it had gone bad, they told us this is what ‘they’ like over here—they being their regular customers or the clearly white demographic they were catering to is a guess as good as any—but that they will accommodate us and bring us another, which they did, but—no points for guessing—it tasted about just the same. We could not even chug it down with water because, here’s another one, they did not give us any! But we persevered, finished our meal, politely asked for our cheque and when asked, told them we were disappointed with our experience and would like to register our feedback with the manager. The person waiting on us clearly did not expect this but left to get the manager. The catch is, they never returned. Tired, disappointed and with a dissertation to...