The Doric Tavern — Restaurant in City of Edinburgh

This was the highlight food experience of our London and Scotland trip in September. My boyfriend (now husband) recommended Doric because he had eaten the best Haggis and Sticky Toffee Pudding on his trip to Scotland a few years ago. I made a reservation for a weekend evening about a month in advance.

We were seated immediately in a delightful little nook of the top floor of the restaurant. They were very clear that the food will take time because everything is made from scratch and fresh, but we were prepared for that. We ordered a wine and a whiskey and a cheese plate to go with that. The alcohols were great but the cheese plate was a little blah in comparison to the food that was forthcoming.

For food, we ordered the Haggis (obviously), the Shepherd's pie and the Sticky Toffee Pudding. The Haggis was the star. The best Haggis I've had in my 3 days in Scotland (and I had Haggis everywhere I went). The meat was delicious, the turnips were scrumptious and the potatoes were so creamy! The icing on the cake was the sauce which blended everything together in a mouthwatering morsel that just got all my taste buds singing. The shepherd's pie was also very very very good!! In fact, when we ate leftovers a day later, the minced meat and peas from the shepherd's pie with the potato had accumulated even more flavor. The Sticky toffee pudding was perfect - sticky, not too sweet, warm and so comforting!

This was an excellent meal and I will come back here every single time I am...

Visiting both the bar on the ground floor for 2 hours before heading upstairs to the restaurant. (Friday 28th Dec) The decor of both the bar and restaurant is as I remember it as a student in the 80's, traditional, classic, perfect. The service in the bar was challenging it is understaffed (everyone wants to work upstairs) there's always a queue, we watched small groups walk in wait 5 minutes and walk out again knowing it was going to take too long to get served. One group of gents commented additionally that they didn't recognise any of the beer being served... a bit weird considering I was drinking Guiness. However it has to be said it does favour the uncommon, not typical selection of lagers and IPAs... I had Tennents with my meal... Clientele were both local and visitors. The restaurant upstairs is great, the service superb. Although children are not allowed in the bar there was a crying baby upstairs that thankfully left 10 minutes into our arriving. I had ribs to start, the sauce was dominated by tomatoe puré, the meat amazing, the sauce not so much. For main, I had the Doric Curry, again the pork meat was superb, the sauce was a bit odd, coconut and pineapple... which clearly I was expecting just not the flavour. It came with perfectly cooked, steamed rice. I declined the sweet (too much Guiness downstairs) and went for the espresso. Great service, good value. I would go again purely based on the great...

Everyone associates drinking before getting on a train at Waverley station with the Balmoral Hotel, which keeps its clock three minutes fast to help late travellers. I prefer The Doric, Edinburgh’s self-proclaimed oldest gastro pub.

Doric is Scotland pertains less to columns than to a dialect spoken in Aberdeenshire. The Doric is so named due to all the seventeenth-century Aberdonians visiting Edinburgh that stopped off here, and presumably talked to each other in their home accent (as opposed to a home counties pan loaf accent). And this has transformed since the 1600s into a bar and bistro.

To be honest, the food upstairs in the bistro is nice, but not that special (and plastic menus with scuffed edges and “cullen skin” (sic) are not my favourite). (Although The List likes the cullen skink.) What I like about The Doric is its downstairs bar.

Narrow bolted tables with banquettes and stools, real Edinburgh beers and ciders to drink, a selection of pies to snack on. Old pub mirrors all over the wall. And stumbling distance to Waverley station for train catching purposes. I drank Thistly Cross Traditional cider – a tasty and refreshing cider made in Dunbar, near Edinburgh.

There are annoyances – fellow travellers and all their luggage, two televisions in the bar tuned to different channels, and its quite popular for office parties – but The Doric remains my favourite hidey-hole before heading off...