Sturm und Drams

'Royal is my Race' is the motto of the Gregor clan, the family which gives its name to the Royal McGregor pub on the Royal Mile. The clan was outlawed for two hundred years by the Campbell clan (perpetrators of the Glencoe massacre in 1692, no less), and the pub serves as a reminder of Scotland's bloody, confusing, and often bloody confusing history. You will not necessarily be treated like royalty at the Royal McGregor, but they have salmon goujons, so things definitely even out.

The Royal McGregor’s placement on the Royal Mile (or High Street, as the locals call it) might be a reason to keep on walking, but a haggis is a haggis for a’ that, as Scotland’s Most-Famous-Person-Ever Robert Burns once said, so put aside your prejudices. This cubby hole of a pub is a favourite with tourists and locals alike: young Australian backpackers gearing up for a ghost tour of the Niddry Street vaults; advocates from the nearby Court of Session ordering one last Guinness before tottering home to New Town; lone young men with books; couples. Despite the mixed crowd, it is quiet on a weekday. There is something about small spaces that engenders silence.

The menu is extensive and well-priced, and the food filling. The Crofter’s Chicken, for example, is an unexpected joy to behold, and equally a joy to consume: chicken breast stuffed with haggis, bathed in the life-giving waters of a whisky sauce which tastes almost exactly like melted butter. The set menu, priced at a ludicrously reasonable £12.95 for three courses, further echoes Scottish cuisine’s complete dismissal of the obesity crisis: deep-fried haggis, followed by the haggis bridie (vegetarian alternative in name only), topped off with a sticky toffee pudding.

And the whisky. Ah, the whisky. Some places trade too much on their ‘unique selection of whiskies’ but the Royal McGregor has some unexpected treasures on its shelves, like the Rosebank 1991, a silent still. This means that the distillery no longer produces whisky, so grab a dram of this before it all runs out. This flowery dram is probably about as old as you are, and for only £4, it won’t cost you much to recapture your youth. There is no possibility of choosing the lesser of two evils at the Royal McGregor, but sometimes it feels good to be bad.