Konkana

I’d noticed the arrival of Konkana where Leven’s and Rigatoni’s used to trade. Promising Indian seafood dishes – from the team behind Kalpna – this sounded right up my street.

As before, the restaurant frontage has full length windows and a sort of glitzy look to it. It looks a little like an airport lounge and seems to have been quite an off-putting exterior as both previous businesses really struggled to get punters through the door.

Konkana faces the same challenges but has a menu that offers something different in terms of Indian dining options available in the city.

Unfortunately, on my visit I had a few issues. In particular, I found dish descriptions poorly articulated which caused some mismatch in expectations. Maybe I was having a slow brain day…

For example, my main course of crab banjara gave the impression of offering soft shell crab, which I took to mean whole crab cooked in a tempura style. Unaware of what banjara meant, it came as a surprise when a crab and prawn stew topped with king prawns arrived.

When I raised this with the chef, he said that the mention of soft shell crab was a misprint. This is fair enough and perhaps symptomatic of routine teething troubles, but it felt a bit sloppy.

The dish was lightly aromatic and pretty satsifying, although the prawns were overcooked. With minor tweaks this could be a very impressive dish.

My starter was a more straighforward plate of fish tikka. This was three good chunks of white fish in a gram flour batter. It was good quality stuff.

The place is at the start of its journey so has the opportunity to grow and develop, but quickly needs to cut out the silly menu mistakes and build upon is what is a very appealing idea that they’re fairly close to delivering well.

So overall, I had a bit of a wobbly experience at Konkana but it’s a place I’d recommend that you visit. By then, they assure me they will have addressed the menu issues – if not, please ask the accommodating staff members for descriptions of the dishes if you find anything unclear – so you should be able to enjoy high quality seafood dishes in the south Indian style. I’ll return next year for a full review once they’re fully bedded-in.

I ate: fish tikka, Goanese crab stew, rice

I drank: lager, water

I wore: black shirt

Total bill: £27.35

Address: 30-32 Leven Street, Edinburgh EH3 9LJ