Grand Cafe Edinburgh

The cocktails at this restaurant were fantastic, and our server, Mr. Shanmukh, provided excellent service.

We received excellent service from Mr. Shanmukh. He made our dining experience the best.

Came here for mine and my boyfriends anniversary dinner and to be honest I think we would have had a better meal at bread meats bread across the road. The advertisement for this place makes it look high class and vintage, however it is completely the opposite. It seems like they just let anyone in this place and we did witness a man order two drinks and do a runner which really set the mood. I ordered an amaretto sour and for £13.50 it was tiny. My lamb was absolutely beautiful but the presentation looked absolutely nothing like the pictures online that had been taken by others. My partner had the steak frites and for the price he could have had a much better steak at Miller and Carter. The deserts were presented as to how I expected the rest of the meal to be, so congratulations to the chef in charge of deserts who knows how to set a plate. Finally the service was just everywhere, we had 3 different servers who came to us every 45 minutes. Order drinks, wait 40 odd minutes to order food. Order food, wait 40 odd minutes to order dessert. Ordered dessert, waited 40 odd minutes for the bill. We spent much longer in there than we even wanted to be. We got in there at 6:30pm and left at 9pm. I have never spent that long in a restaurant in all my life. The staff were okay, I did notice a huge group which probably overwhelmed them, but if they hired more competent adults instead of people under 25 I assume the night would have run much smoothly. Considering it 's attached to a beautiful retro style picturehouse and £600 a night hotel we expected better from the cafe. Perhaps the title 'grand ' should be taken away.

I had a great time with my husband. We had a couple of cocktails and some nibbles, our server Shanmukh was great and provided a friendly service. He suggested some nibbles and coctails which were really nice. He made our visit very enjoyable, we will surely come back soon.

The service in this place is really bad. Like really bad. I think its a case of losing competent staff during covid and having to replace this with students who have no vested interest in this restaurant. Zero knowledge of the menu, food or drinks. No real care taken to make our time a special one, its hard to flag a server down. If anything, we felt like a burden being there, and felt bad that our servers had to ask the kitchen what different dishes/specialties were (questions like what is a Jacobs Ladder/what is the specialty drink of today? . I would recommend management remove the service fee, this may motivate staff to care about the patrons.