I’ll get my peeve out of the way at the beginning. It all just took a long time. Long time to take orders. Long time for each course to arrive. Long time to get the bill. The sort of “long time” that, if this was your first visit, there may well not be a second. As it is, we’ve been several times over the years and not had this problem before, so we will be coming back. With fingers crossed that it won’t be for the last time.
As to the food, it was as good as ever. As an entirely vegetarian restaurant, there’s a much greater choice of dishes than you’re going to find amongst the veggie offerings at a “high street” Indian restaurant. That said, we decided our starter would be the chaat sharing platter, with items that you will find in any decent Indian. Bhel puri – crisp rice and a kick from chilli. Samosa chaat – chopped samosa, potato and chickpeas, topped with yoghurt. And a couple of (almost) single bite puri.
Main courses were also familiar to us but only from having eaten them here in the past. They were from the Punjabi section of the menu ( the South Indian and Gujarati/Rajasthani sections not winning out on this visit). Kaju Masala is actually a dish I’ve tried to cook at home recently. And, having tasted a professional version, I reckon I made it with some success. Cashew nuts in a tomato based sauce. It’s quite creamy in texture as ground nuts go into the sauce. There’s a nutty background sweetness in amongst the more assertive spices. Really nice. The other main was a jackfruit curry (Kathal Lazeez on the menu). The menu says, with some justification that it will “surprise the meat eaters”. You can see why – there’s texture to it and you can pull the chunks apart, into stringy pieces like long cooked meat or, say, pulled pork. Like the other dish, it’s quite saucey and we’d gone heavy on the carbs for mopping up the last of the sauces. They offer a bread basket – a soft garlic naan, tandoori roti crisp in all the right places and methi thepla, a thin soft bread given great colour by turmeric and flavoured with fenugreek.
