Sangam has just reopened after a closure of several months. According to the website, the closure was due to a “shortage of chefs”. I was born yesterday so am, obviously, prepared to believe this.
There’s been some changes to the menu. Gone is the “desi” section which provided good Punjabi main courses on our last visit. But there is now a “Bengali Street Food” section. And this provided starters for both of us. That was bhel puri and samosa chaat. Unfortunately, neither were good examples. They looked right and the flavour was OK, if a little lacking in the sharpness of tamarind, but it was let down on texture. The puffed rice in the bhel wasn’t crisp and nor was the chopped samosa pastry. It was, perhaps, as though both had been made a long, long, time before.
Mains were better. Subzi Mishali was a mix of nicely cooked vegetables – potato, cauliflower, peas, broccoli, carrot and onion in a quite clingy tomatoey sauce. The other dish was lamb rezala – Google had previously told me that this was a traditional Bengali dish and I knew what it should be like – as the menu describes it, it should be fragrant from cardamom, cloves, garlic and ginger. In the event, it was pleasant enough but hardly fragrant. Carbs in the form of rice and naan were decent enough.
When we were here last, in May 2017, service was an issue and so it was again. It took overly long for orders to be taken, overly long for starters and main courses to arrive. It is not as though they were busy. They were not. Only four tables were occupied. There was little for the four servers to do – and at one point they sat themselves down for a chat (I can’t recall ever seeing that before in any restaurant). It’s reasonable to conclude there are issues here both in the kitchen and “front of house”. With good south Asian food so easy to find within a few minutes of here, I doubt we’ll be rushing back to Sangam.
