Paradise Cafe

When I moved to Edinburgh from Manchester, I was delighted to discover that chippies up here were just that and not «cook from frozen takeaways» like I’d been subjected to throughout my time in England’s second city. I grew up in a small town where the chippy was an integral part of my family’s way of life and there’s still a chippy at either end of my (not so huge) street — despite many other shops in the immediate area closing down since the days of my youth.
In fact just stop reading this a minute and search youtube for Chippy Tea by the Lancashire Hotpots. That should do enough to describe what I’m talking about.
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Anyway I digress — the above waffle should serve to position the fact that I love a good chippy, so when I originally moved to Edinburgh and found that Paradise café was situated directly over the road from my new apartment, I was practically beaming. Unfortunately for me then, Paradise Café is not a good chippy.
One of the establishment’s main issues is that it seems to want to offer you everything — and I’m not talking about the requisite cigarettes, chocolate bars and dog food that you’ll find in just about every chippy in Edinburgh. What I’m talking about here is chips, pizza, kebabs, curries, sausages, burgers, deep fried ribs and a whole multitude of other options. This may not sound all too different from every other takeaway you’ve ever been to but when there are over a hundred choices on the menu and all you really want is a good chippy tea then something evidently is amiss.
A regular portion of chips will set you back £1.20 and they’re nice enough I suppose although the portions are a little small — the low marking comes for most of the other food I’ve tried on the menu. The pizzas have been soggy and disgusting, the curries bland and utterly unlike any other curry I’ve tried in my entire life and the kebabs… I shudder just to think of them. This place could do with a kick up the bum and a little refocusing on which style of food they want to serve — is it chippy teas? Curries? Regular takeaway fare (pizzas, burgers etc)? Because it’s quite evident that this «we serve everything!» approach isn’t suiting them all too well; I’d much prefer to go in and have ten really good things to choose from rather than over a hundred below average ones.
But as I mentioned above, I come from a place where the star of the show at a chippy is the chips themselves, so maybe my expectations of what chippies should be is set by expectations established at a very early age (i.e. good). Whatever the weather I wouldn’t go out of my way to visit this chippy, the Asda down the road is ALWAYS open (no Sunday trading nonsense in Scotland thank you very much) so you’d be much better drunkenly stumbling down there and cooking yourself some McCain Home Fries once you get back home — even with the inherent burn risk involved with drink-​cooking.