Fiona Duff: It's steak when the chips are down

Earlier this week a friend's husband came to stay with us. He's going to be doing an exhibition later this year in Edinburgh about which you will read in the future.

Steak at the Chop House was right up hubby's street

The thing is, he’s a vegetarian – he has been for as long as I have known him and several years before that.

To be honest, I am forever saying to the husband that we should eat less meat but he takes little heed of this idea. For him the perfect meal is steak and chips, which is what he orders nearly every time we are out in a restaurant.

“Try something different,” I suggest but this generally falls on deaf ears. So when he heard that the Chop House was opening a third branch in Bruntsfield we were heading there faster than you can say Aberdeen Angus.

Being a horny-handed son of the soil, he likes nothing more than a waiter who can tell him the provenance of the piece of beef that he is about to shovel into his mouth.

I have to hand it to the owners of the Chop House as their staff really do know their stuff.

Adhering to the ‘when in Rome’ principle, I also had a steak and I have to say it was incredibly juicy and tender, with a selection of accompanying sauces that all tasted delicious.

Had my friend’s husband not been vegetarian then we might have even have taken him there to show off a groovy Edinburgh restaurant (have I mentioned that it is very cool interior wise?).

As it was I made my non-meat lasagne, which is what his sort usually get when they pitch up at our gaff.

Everyone ate it and made appreciative noises, but I could almost hear my other half saying that what it really needed was a bit of mince.

So, to make up, we shall return to the Chop House soon. In the meantime I shall have the left over lasagne for lunch as there don’t seem to be any other takers in our home.