Charcoal Aviemore

We were up in Aviemore for the weekend and noticed Charcoal on the high street, we tried booking online/phoning them to which no luck. We decided to turn up on the evening and luckily got the last table. It would be good if they could sort an online booking portal for future bookings as it is a really busy restaurant. If you love Turkish cuisine, you will love Charcoal. It's located in Aviemore train station and is central for both car parking bus travel. We ordered the chicken lamb shish with a naan bread to share and were blown away with how good it was, the portion size is great and the whole atmosphere of watching trains passing by was incredible. Staff are friendly but seem to be a little inexperienced with the menu and customers. The food is brilliant but is very costly with shish dishes being above £18 and gins £6 plus, I highly recommend trying them if you are in Aviemore!

Food was very nice however halloumi fries had to be sent back they had been deep fried which made them taste salty. Staff very attentive and friendly. Visiting from North East England and would probably try again in the future.

I visited this lovely restaurant as it had grilled food and Turkish food. I came from Birmingham and wanted to try a place which had a mixture of asian and western food. The staff were very friendly and polite. We asked them to recommend some dishes to try. They recommended the king prawn shish and mixed grill. For starters we tried some Calamari, garlic bread with Mezzo trio and Haloumi cheese and sautéed garlic mushrooms it was presented well and was tasty. For mains we had the classic cheese burger meal, fish and chips and mixed grill and chicken wings.We were all pleased with the quality and quantity of the food. I would definitely recommend and visit again .

I'm struggling to give even 1 star. I have never experienced such poor service or had such unedible food. A table for 2 we ordered 2 starters and 2 mains at 8pm. One starter came out and by the time I managed to get a waiters attention my partner had eaten their starter. I declined to wait for it Any longer and cancelled my starter.the mains arrived, looking great, but on tasting the food it tasted burnt. Turning over the meat showed it to be quite badly charred giving the foul taste. It was returned to the kitchen and I declined a new one to be cooked. Not an enjoyable experience

We arrived for lunch at the opening time of 1 pm, only to be told that the staff hadn’t shown up yet by a very apologetic waitress. We decided to get some drinks and wait for the staff as we wanted to try this new restaurant in the heart of Aviemore. The waitress was so good and apologised at least three times before the staff finally rolled up 35 minutes later. The business seemed to lose a lot of customers when they were told there were no staff. We placed our orders, two chicken tikka and two chicken shish. So the staff arrived around 1.35 and seemed in no rush to get started. No manager came over to speak to us at any moment. Amazingly after only 10 minutes, we received our order; how long does it take to fire up a charcoal grill? Did we just get reheats from the previous day? The waiter did not utter a word to us, and I felt he was annoyed at us for coming to the restaurant. The food was edible but so plain for an Indian, and the chicken was very dry. The chicken shish was just pieces of dry plain chicken with a side salad and a tiny pot of sauce with hardly any flavour. The chicken tikka again had minimal flavour and only had five small pieces of chicken swimming in a large pot of sauce. No one came to ask if we enjoyed our meal, no one apologised for our 35-minute wait, and we received no discount or additional extras to make up for it. We left £90 worse off and felt very ripped off. I get that staff can be late due to unforeseen circumstances, but to give us subpar food, no apology, no recompense, we will never return. Give the waitress a raise; she was the only one with any sense of how to run a business.