Secret Edinburgh: Underground canteens with Max & Ivan

When we first visited Edinburgh, as dewey-eyed undergraduates , the Mosque Kitchen quite genuinely saved our lives.

 

For unimaginably small sums of money one could purchase huge portions of real, hearty food - steaming curry; infinite quantities of rice; gloopy, nourishing dahl and succulent kofte kebabs. It was stodgy, it was served up on paper plates and eaten under a tarpaulin in an invariably rainy carpark, but it was heaven. It was the only way we survived a month of performing in an atrocious 'edgy' piece of 'new writing' whilst suffering from chronic sleep-deprivation and cirrhosis of the everything.

 

And then something changed. Gradually, as we returned - in comedy shows of our own devising - the Mosque Kitchen started to get...corporate.

 

The prices went up - only incrementally, but still. And then, horror of horrors, last year it had moved - from its beloved quasi-legal carpark arrangement to an actual *indoor* building, with *real* chairs - not the combination of benches, plastic garden furniture and caked-in pigeon faeces we had come to love and expect.

 

So what next? As we write this, on the train up to Edinburgh 2012, there's every chance that they'll have a 'menu', or that you'll need to 'book', or that a three-course meal will actually cost £10. If that's the case, we'll mainly be happy for the success of the hardworking folk who run the Mosque Kitchen, yet we'll also mourn the passing of a wonderful era.

 

But until then, we raise a lukewarm can of Rubicon Mango to the finest cash-only Mosque-run Edinburgh-based canteen we've ever eaten at.

 

Max & Ivan are appearing in Max And Ivan Are.... Con Artists, at the Pleasance at the Pleasance Courtyard until August 27th. For more information visit their edfringe.com listing.