Castle Business Park, Craigforth, Stirling 01786 465577 Style: Upmarket modern Food: Contemporary Scottish Price: £12.95 for two courses early evening, £20 for two-course dinner Wheelchair access: Yes You could be forgiven - if you're a miserable so-and-so - for arguing that The River House operates somewhat under false credentials. After all, the body of water that the restaurant sits upon is not a river as the name might suggest (the Forth must be at least half a mile away, by my numerically illiterate reckoning), or a loch as the restaurant's website describes it. It's a pond. A pond in a business park on the edge of Stirling.
And then once you're inside, settled at a table in one of its two dining areas (colour scheme in both is red and wood), the big top-style roof with its canvas swoops might give you the idea that you're about to have something of a theatrical dining experience, which isn't the case either. Instead, what you get is decent food, friendly, efficient and, on a Sunday night, mostly eastern European service (I'm not suggesting that the friendliness and efficiency has something to do with that eastern Europeanness, but the implication is there if you want to take it - one of the unremarked bonuses that have resulted from globalisation).
We've enlarged our booking rather late in the day, so this evening the six of us (wife, mother-in-law, teenage niece, two daughters and me) are stuck up on the children's mezzanine in the inner dining room. If it feels a little cut off from the buzz of the room below, at least you can enjoy it from an Olympian height, and the younger members of our party - aged six and 11, to be biologically precise - can leave the table and play with all the toys that are piled up in the corner. The fact that they don't do so until after their meal is a good sign. Kids' meals in restaurants are always the usual suspects - sausage and mash, chicken goujons and chips, pasta - but at least here the goujons do look as if they might once have been running around the farmyard. They are thick and meaty and lightly breaded and are hoovered up quickly. Even the chips have a floury, fleshy taste to them. This is proper food, not a Happy Meal.
The River House seems to be good at chicken. On the other side of the table my mother-in-law is making appreciative noises over her roast breast of chicken with white onion and ale jus. "The chicken melts in the mouth," she says between bites. The rest of us have, for various reasons - taste, allergies, foodie politics - gone for the veggie option.
That's option, singular, note, a pretty typical scenario in most restaurants who seem to regard vegetarians as second-class citizens. Of course, what this should mean is that the singular veggie option should always be something special. If we don't have a choice, at least we should have reliability. All too often, though, the no-meat option is a no-effort option too.
So, how does our vegetable chilli with hot cajun nachos and topped with sour cream fare? Well, it could be a lot worse. The vegetables are crisply done and the sauce plentiful. What it lacks, though, is any real kick.
There should surely be something a little masochistic about choosing the chilli dish. This one is not even entry-level hot. Still, all three plates are wiped clean by the end of the meal. And almost everyone is too full for a sweet. Which is, in its own way, as good a review as you can get. And, on reflection, the pond's quite nice, too.
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