It’s barely begun but this year’s Edinburgh Festival already has a distinctive flavour. I’m not talking about the mighty themes in this year’s cultural programme, but about the extraordinary revolution of the Indian food scene in the Scottish capital. Two of Scotland’s highest-profile Scots-Sikh chefs, Tony Singh and Hardeep Singh Kohli – both of whom are media celebs in their own right for their TV work – can jointly take credit for shaking up the often lacklustre set offering in so many Indian restaurants.

Singh Kohli, whose parents are from Punjab, recently opened his first Scottish restaurant VDeep in Leith, blames often moribund Indian fare on a “lack of curation” of Indian food since its first incarnation here in the 1960s, when all the curry sauces were basically the same.

Both men are on individual missions to change all that, and as they battle it out there’s a new energy emerging. Fresh Scottish produce is being taken by the scrag of the neck, as it were, and given the treatment with a range of spices and traditional techniques applied to specific dishes. Different flavours are teased out of ingredients so that they’re not drowned out by the heat – or swamped by the blandness of a certain bright pink creamy sauce. They’re bringing to it an authentic street food vibe and the result is a renaissance of this most forsaken sector of the eating-out scene.

VDeep’s 21 high-end sharing plates at around £7 each include slow cooked leg of mutton with pickling spices, green chilli butter crab, kerelan rainbow trout, pork cheek vindaloo, Kohli fried chicken with spices, bubble and Sikh (spiced potato cakes), curried cauliflower cheese and venison korma.

Pork cheek vindaloo and an experimental hot and sour pork belly curry have been particularly successful takes on Scots-Indian cuisine. A curried shepherd’s pie, curried lasagne, curried cock-a-leekie soup and haggis vindaloo are on the cards for the winter menu.

Tony Singh’s Road Trip – a pop-up restaurant at the Apex International hotel in the Grassmarket – is a rather bold first-time venture for the independent hotel group and, I’d wager, its deliberate departure from standard hotel fare is aimed at attracting a younger cosmopolitan crowd.

The menu references the Edinburgh-born chef’s BBC television programme A Cook Abroad, where he visited India and Vietnam, and features a range of irreverently titled dishes rooted in the Edinburgh takeaway culture, such as chicken tikka pie, Coogate burger, Deuchars single fish, poutine (chips and cheese curds) and Old Town Sundae complete with strawberries, ice-cream, meringues and spices.

It all sounds like a lot of fun, but there’s a serious intent behind Singh’s alternative take on the food fusion from his Scottish birthplace and his ancestral homeland of Punjab. He flippantly calls it a “mash-up of styles and flavours from around the world” but everything he serves is made from scratch in the Apex kitchen by him and his staff, who tell me working with him has been amazing. In turn, Singh says he’s learning from them too. Fermented and fresh chilli sauce, kimchi for the fried rice in the Korean Burrito, pickled mooli for the Vuhra spiced lamb kebab, and bitter salted caramel sauce are just some examples.

His is not Michelin star food; it’s food for everyone with prices low enough to encourage accessibility and experimentation. Street food it may be but it also echoes the ethos of the langar, or communal kitchens of Punjab, where everyone is welcome to eat together regardless of faith or social class, education or wealth.

It seems to me that in their culinary outlook there are more similarities than differences between these two chefs. As Singh Kohli puts it, he is both haggis and vindaloo. His food is a reflection of who he is, just as Tony Singh’s symbiotic approach is as natural to him as breathing.

Perhaps it’s time we learned from them and started to regard Indian food as ours, as part of our own culinary culture, rather than some sort of exotic otherness that we have no stake in. After all, Indian food has been around for almost 70 years, longer than many of us have been alive. And Scottish produce is proving that it’s more than up for the challenge.

Assimilation is what it’s all about. Who knows? Maybe in a few decades’ time they might not have to revert to using Punjabi puns such as bubble and Sikh to get the message across.