Sunday, 6 July 2014

Howies

If you continue down past the East end of Princes Street into Waterloo Place, you come across Howies Scottish restaurant. The restaurant is located in an old spacious building, with a massive bay window leaking in loads of light. With a large skylight and elegant wood tables, this all combines to create a very pleasant environment to be seated in and have lunch. It is easy to see why this place is also used as a wedding reception venue!



The ethos of the food at Howies is fresh produce, cooked daily with daily changing menus. The lunch menu offers the excellent value of 2 courses for £9.95, a main with either a starter or pudding. Knowing that Howies has a good reputation for food we had high expectations! I decided to go with a main and pudding, the free range chicken breast for main and with seasonal fruits in mind, the summer strawberry summer pudding. All the food was well presented and well cooked and good sizes considering the value. I really appreciated that there was also no fancy tricks here, just really good down to earth food.





Howies also had quite a reasonable looking wine list and a pretty good beer selection which focused on the nearby Stewart brewery, in-keeping with the local produce theme.



The only slight downside to the whole experience was that the service was a wee bit slow. This is important for us as we only have an hour for our lunch. It would be less relevant for a relaxing weekend lunch! To be fair we had a member of our party turn up late, which confused the order a little bit, causing a mixup on the arrival of the puddings. It just made a little bit difficult for us to get back to the office in a reasonable time frame. With just a little bit more efficiency on the service front, Howies would have been a faultless dining experience.



In conclusion, I would highly recommend Howies for their excellent value lunch. The food was fresh and seasonal and atmosphere provided a very pleasant dining experience.

Quality Food                      9.50
Quality Drinks                    8.00
Value                                  9.00
Service                               7.50
Ambience                            8.25
Overall                                 9.00

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Bill - Free range chicken breast, summer fruit pudding, bottle Stewart Amble ale + tip: £15

Comments:
- Great place. One of the best salmon I ever had, nice pudding.
- I started with chicken from the lunch deal - fantastic flavours, as the chicken was roasted well, and stuffed with a herby cream paste. The veg was cooked to perfection (long beans and potatoes). This was followed by a "strawberry summer pudding". No Tesco jam in this - a kind of pie stuffed full of strawberries, topped with a home made jam and sauce, with cubes of ginger jelly on the side. Both for a tenner, and washed down with a bottled dark Scottish beer.
- Food really top notch. Unfortunately service a wee bit slow.

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