The Advocate, Edinburgh

Located just off the Royal Mile, this is a good sized pub that inevitably caters somewhat to the tourist market given it’s location, but I found it to be a decent enough pub with friendly and efficient bar staff. Décor wise it’s quite traditional, with a mixture of dark wood strip and tartan carpet on the floor, a mustard colour ceiling with several flags affixed to it and various paint shades on the walls including maroon and duck egg blue. A number of gilded mirrors were on the walls and there were also several large TV screens scattered around which perhaps spoilt the ambience somewhat. These were showing a terrestrial news channel, but at least the volume was off so this was not too intrusive. Seating was a mixture of padded bch seating around the perimeter and regular tables and chairs. The laminated menu looked to be a rather mass produced affair, but included a good choice of “pub grub” dishes such as CTM, fish & chips, lasagne, sausage & mash and so on, as well as a number of burgers. Most main courses were priced somewhere around the £9 - £10 mark. I went for the chicken, bacon and leek pie and this was on the whole pretty decent, certainly very tasty, although it could perhaps have been a bit bigger and the accompanying mash was perhaps a little stodgy. Beers on tap were Rockin’ Rudolph, Greene King IPA, Kelburn Ginger Bells and their own Advocate Ale. The solitary cider was a rather disappointing Aspall’s. Overall, a bit too much of a chain pub perhaps, but a decent enough pit stop nonetheless.