I  first ate at Mother India restaurant in Glasgow about twenty years ago, we had just returned from Mexico and were looking for a sight in Edinburgh or Glasgow to open Lupe Pintos. Having spent the day trawling the west end looking at properties we decided to have a meal at the relatively new and much talked about Mother India Restaurant. We secured an amazing deal on a wee shop in Edinburgh two days later and although our visit to Glasgow failed on that occasion to turn up a decent property deal, the achievement that day was the beginning of a twenty year dining affair with an organization that will always have my respect and custom. On that particular evening I remember the most amazing and perfectly fried vegetable pakoras, not balls of crunchy grease that many Scottish Indian establishments were serving at the time, but real vegetables perfectly cooked in seasoned gram flour, presented with  an interesting dressed salad and exciting sauce not shredded iceberg with dayglo hot sauce, poisoned with heaps of dried mint and way too much vinegar. The main dishes were spectacular, we shared a lamb sag still the same recipe they use to this day, the second dish a sizzling platter of trout with chilli and lime, brought to our table by a middle aged Indian chef with long hair wearing his trademark white dentist coat.  A dozen years later when I was working with the then List Magazines food editor Barry Shelby on establishing that years best budget restaurant in Glasgow, the same chef turned up in the Wee Curry Shop, flipping and charring nan bread with a blow torch.  A mixture of his talents and the Mother India formula of great service, food and freshly pulled pints of draught Kingfisher, blew the competition away.

We have celebrated many family and friends occasions at one of the Mother India establishments and when they launched in Edinburgh I was at the opening. Over the years they have never failed me or any of the people I have enthusiastically sent in their direction. There I’ve started off a miserable sleety February with a positive note.