Thamel Edinburgh
The Scotsman's critic ordered the most expensive main on the menu and the cheapest one side by side, and gave her headline to the £14 curry.
Why go
Gaby Soutar reviewed this in May 2024, a few weeks after it opened, and scored the food 8/10.1 The kitchen belongs to the people behind Gautam's on Dalziel Place, and it took over a site Soutar describes with some feeling: one of the Scottish capital's most cursed slots. I've reviewed various businesses at this blind spot of a location and restaurants rarely stick.
Two years later it has stuck hard enough that the venue now runs the full a la carte in a downstairs speakeasy when the dining room fills.3 The cooking works Nepalese technique across a Scottish larder, and the seasoning is where it shows: whole timur berries in the village chicken curry, a tomato, sesame and hemp-seed achar with the momo.
Order this / avoid
- Order: gau ko jukhuro, the £14 village-style chicken curry on the bone. Soutar's line on it:
It was very comforting, with hunks of meat and a thick fox red sauce that had depth, with garlic, ginger and the citrussy addition of whole timur berries.
1 - Order: the momo, and eat the achar with everything.
The magic could be found in the accompanying achar, or chutney, which was blobbed in the middle of the plate like a setting sun and contained tomato, sesame and hemp seed. They should sell this by the jar.
1 - Avoid: reaching for the £23 scallops moilee on price alone. That comparison has already been run in print and the £14 dish won it.
- Avoid: letting the Goan seafood sit while you talk. Soutar:
I'd suggest you eat the Goan seafood option quickly, as the fishy quartet was in a bowlful of hot sauce, so do continue to cook a bit. We wished we'd been a bit faster.
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What locals & experts say
- Gaby Soutar, The Scotsman (2024): Food 8/10, Ambience 8/10, under the headline
'The £14 curry was my favourite': Does this restaurant serve Scotland's best curry?
. She hedged her verdict on the address rather than the cooking:Perhaps this could be the restaurant to break the East London Street curse.
1 - The List (2024): Suzy Pope's unscored review four months later found the range holding up. The Himalayan hot pot was
fabulously tangy
, the naga curries carrieda fiery kick after every delicious bite
, and the garlic naan arriveddripping with butter
. She prices a main curry with rice at an average of £23.2 - On the room:
The space features a mural of the Himalayas, a burnt umber colour scheme, and fringed lamps and flowers, presumably to reference the Seventies hippie residents of Kathmandu's Thamel neighbourhood.
1 - Nobody who cooks here is named anywhere. No published source credits a chef, and no award attaches to the restaurant.
Good to know
- Booking: recommended, and the venue is candid about why. Its own notice reads:
Due to high demand for dinner reservations, we are now serving the full à la carte menu in The Blind Tiger Speakeasy until 9 PM. If you're unable to find a table in the restaurant, please book for the Speakeasy instead.
3 - Access: the speakeasy is downstairs, and the venue says itself that it "may not be suitable for all guests" and asks you to say so when booking. Worth raising at the point of booking rather than at the door.
- Timing: lunch through dinner. The full menu in the lower room stops at 9pm.
- Price: momo £6.50, fish poori tacos £9, paneer makhani £12, the village chicken curry £14, scallops moilee £23, pilau rice £4.50, jaggery sticky toffee pudding £8.50, a Thamel Margarita £11. All 2024 figures.
- A menu trap: the paneer makhani exists as both a side and a full plate, and it is easy to order the second while meaning the first.
- Getting there: the corner of East London Street and Broughton Street, five minutes down from the east end of Queen Street. It is often filed as New Town; the postcode and the pin both say Broughton.
- Hygiene: Food Hygiene Information Scheme Pass, inspected 27 January 2026.
Jeff's take (his words)
- Note: "New Nepalese curry 8/10 Scotsman. Insta rec"
- On the 8/10: it is Gaby Soutar's review of 27 May 2024, food scored 8 out of 10, and the £14 curry she picked as her favorite is the order recommendation above.
- On the Instagram rec: that is how the place reached his list. This page sources nothing from Instagram.
Verdict
should-visit — The cheap dish is the good one at this Nepalese kitchen, and a critic established that by testing it deliberately. Gaby Soutar ordered the £23 scallops moilee and the £14 gau ko jukhuro together, scored the food 8/10, and gave her headline to the £14: hunks of meat on the bone in a thick fox-red sauce carrying garlic, ginger and whole timur berries, which is the Nepalese pepper that does the citrus work in that dish. The craft signal is that the range holds across the card, with a second bylined reviewer calling the naga curries fiery and the Himalayan hot pot tangy months later. The room also sits on a site Soutar calls one of the capital's most cursed slots, where restaurants rarely stick, and two years on it is still there and has had to open a second room downstairs to hold the dinner trade. It stops short of must-visit because nobody who cooks there is named in any source, and both reviews are now two years old.