The retro Leith local with a parrot on the chandelier and a burger menu worth crossing town for.
Lioness of Leith sits on Duke Street in the heart of Leith, a few minutes walk from the foot of Leith Walk. The room is a deliberate junk-shop maximalism, a parrot model perched on the chandelier above the bar, a boar's head on the wall, an arcade machine humming in the corner. The bar opened in December 2013 in the shell of a derelict pub and won Leith's Best Bar in its first year of trading.
This is a place for the long Saturday, not the polite one drink. The Burger Mama kitchen has run inside the room since 2018 with beef from Findlay's of Portobello and buns baked a few hundred yards away. Anyone hoping for a cocktail bar with a hush will be on the wrong street; anyone after a Leith neighbourhood pub that treats the food and the drinks list with equal seriousness will rarely leave on schedule.
Two rooms with a working pool table in the back, a long zinc-topped bar, mismatched leather banquettes, and the parrot. Tripadvisor's 1,698 reviews (4.42 of 5) repeatedly flag the decor as the first thing locals describe to visitors. The lighting drops after 8pm and the music sits at a volume that lets the table next to you stay an unknown quantity.
The drinks list runs deeper than the room suggests. Cocktails from £10 are competent rather than cheffy, with the Espresso Martini named the house pick by Edinburgh Reviews. Six craft taps rotate through Scottish breweries (Vault City, Cromarty, Pilot) and the wine list is short but honest. Skip the frozen daiquiri on a busy weekend, when the volume runs ahead of the build.
The early evening crowd skews local Leith couples and the post-work pizza-by-the-slice trade. After 9pm the room turns louder and younger, with University of Edinburgh and Queen Margaret students taking the tables under the boar. The Scotsman's review called it Leith's most reliable midweek pub, and the pattern still holds in 2026.