Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
1
We don’t usually visit the restaurant on a Friday, so it was a tad surprising how quiet it was. On the other side of that coin, it did mean Donya had time for a bit of a chat It was nice to catch up.
As for the food, we had mini poppadums to nibble on. Then there was a masala dosa to start for one of us. It’s a favourite dish – always good and tonight was no different. The other starter was pav bhaji – quite soupy and you needed the spoon to eat it with. Of course, the spoon is there for what’s left after you finished dunking the toasted bread bap in it. Good spicing but you can still taste the vegetables.
Lamb biryani was fine. I don’t think it was a “proper” biryani cooked from scratch in layers but this was a very tasty “meat and rice”, enhanced with a small bowl of vegetable curry. My partner hadn’t tried the lamb lai bhari before. I said she’d love it. She did. Lamb itself was fantastic and the sauce was excellent – an earthiness from peanuts, sweet from jaggery, sharp from tamarind and just the right kick from chilli. She ate it with a plain naan. What’s not to like.
Funny that I never thought of either masala dosa or pav bhaji as starters but as meals, but I will now!
I have never heard of this, so I tried to looked up a recipe which resulted in a good laugh – in Marathi, “lai bhari” literally means “very heavy”, but in some slang means something along the lines of “awesome”, so I’m guessing the dish is a house creation.
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
3
I think that, on some past review, I’ve mentioned that it is, indeed, a house creation. That’s sort of unusual. With their creations, Sandeep often names them after a Bollywood film but not here. The dish is deffo awesome. If my memory is working correctly, I think they started with bharli vangi and wanted to do a meat based dish that was different but still had some of the flavour notes.
In my experience, pav bhaji will usually appear amongst the starters. Dosas vary - some places have them as starters, others as mains and still others might have them in a sort of “chef recommends” menu section.
