Smithfield Tandoori, Lindsey Street

Nice place, and relatively tastefully decorated - white walls, wooden floors, no velvet or mirror-and-gilt pictures anywhere to be seen. When I strolled in at 6.30pm, there was one other guy having solo curry, which seemed like a good sign.

A nice chap who I took to be the proprietor showed me my table. I ordered:

• 2 poppadoms
• Sheekh kebab Lahore (it seems to be a feature of their menu to put "Lahore" at the end of things)
• Gosht Bolliram (lamb with coriander and mustard seeds and red chilli. hot)
• Pulao Mogulai

Pops basically as expected, except that the yoghurt thing was bright, radioactive green. Pickle (mixed) might have been hotter.

Sheekh kebab was excellent. Not dry or bright red, just meaty. It did want to be more heavily spiced though. Disconcertingly delivered on a little side plate and a big dinner plate was put in front of me. I even ate the garnish (basically just a bit of shredded iceberg) because it had a few coriander leaves in it saving it from utter tastelessness.

Curry and rice arrived in little china bowls. I can never decide if this is better or worse than the metal things, but it does make it hard to judge portion size. Fortunately that was not a problem here. Curry was great - tender (if oddly-shaped) lumps of lean lamb, rich, dark gravy. The chilli wasn't visible to the naked eye, but it was certainly there. Gravy tasted good, and the occasional surprise of biting into a coriander seed kept things interesting. It was almost hot enough to be hard to eat, but not quite. Rice fragrant with saffron, cardamom and fennel seeds.

Since my mouth was still on fire, I finished up with a pistachio kulfi. It was just one of those ones from a little conical packet, but disguised by taking it out, cutting it into six segments and sprinkling it with a frozen raspberry and half a dozen frozen blackcurrants. Disappointing finish.

Service was excellent - attentive but not annoying, friendly but not impertinent. No hard-sell of bread or extra veggies. Food arrived promptly but didn't feel hurried.

Prices - starters all around a fiver, mains 7-10. Pricier than bog-standard curry, but worth it if you fancy something a bit different to bog-standard curry.

Definitely worth a trip.

Daddy Donkey, Leather Lane

Daddy Donkey is a burrito stall which can be found on Leather Lane Market weekday lunchtimes and, apparently muddy fields at Glastonbury, Reading, etc festivals. From a custom van (sadly not like that of B A Baracus) they sell burritos and .. actually just burritos.

A five pound note and a wait of as many minutes (queues permitting) gets you a burro (with black beans) or fajita burrito (with fried onions and peppers) with chilli or freshly grilled beef of chicken (a veggie option with beans, onions and peppers is slightly cheaper), rice, salsa (mild, medium or hot) and cheese or sour cream wrapped in a big tortilla. Optional extras are roasted chillies (sometimes mouth-burning but always tasty) at 25p, and more of any of the above at 50p or a pound.

The result is reliably delicious. All the ingredients are as fresh as one could wish for, the hot salsa (I have never tried anything else) included and the meat grilled before your eyes. The portions, initially a bit mean, are now just the right size for a filling lunch.

The only downsides are that these confections do not hold their heat all that well (though they're fine to eat luke-warm, and a delivery service may be the next development) and that it takes some while to master eating them without getting sauce and bits of rice and meat everywhere.

Gulshan Tandoori, Exmouth Market

Overall: 5/10 I might consider going back but really the food was not nearly good enough.

Warm-up: 7/10

• Poppadoms OK
• Lime pickle a bit unusual - not thick but rather some biggish bits of lime peel floating in quite a lot of oil. Pretty good, actually.
• Mango chutney pretty good - possibly freshly made as the mango still quite firm. A bit sweet for my liking
• Yoghurt thing obviously made with mint sauce, but OK and at least not yellow
• Onion thing looked really good but still with cucumber, so untested

Prawn Puri: 7/10

• Fairly generous portion.
• Bread might have been a little crispier.
• Unusually, the curry came in a separate bowl. The sauce was a bit thick - I prefer it fairly dry. Used non-frozen prawns, but they were slightly overcooked. Medium heat.
• No wedge of lemon, but at least no salad either.

Lamb madras: 4/10

• Nothing like you expect from a madras
• Sauce not smooth but with little slices of onion and tomato, with quite a rich red colour
• Meat enormously overcooked to the point of falling apart
• Heat a little on the light side

Mushroom pilau: 5/10

• Rice overcooked to the point that you barely tell it was basmati
• Big mushrooms chopped small and overcooked to chewiness
• Whole thing tasted mushroomy, with no nice spice flavours

Keema naan: 4/10

• Dough very heavy - more like supermarket naan than something nice and crisp straight out of the tandoor
• Meaty bit OK texture but not spicy enough

Service: 7/10

• Competent, unobtrusive, fairly polite. Didn't nag about veggie dishes or anything (but then I hadn't exactly under-ordered)

Venue: 7/10

• Nice enough place.
• Gents pretty basic.
• Only hint of naffness was tinselly rope things on the walls.

Value: 7/10

• All the above and two small cans of Perrier for 18 GBP doesn't seem too bad.

Spices, Chapel Market

Overall: 6/10

Poppadoms: 7/10

• Not quite crunchy enough
• Generous portion of lime pickle. Might have been a little bit hotter, but otherwise excellent
• The rest basically as usual

Starter: Gosht lazeez 5/10

• Little bits of lamb apparently in a thick, sour gingery sauce.
• Not at all hot
• Overcooked

Chicken Naga Masala: 5/10

• "The traditional ingredient from Bangle Desh. The fresh exciting taste prapared with special hot bengal chillies to satisfy everyone from madras to extremely hot"
• Confirmed all my prejudices about the pointlessness of chicken curry
• Chicken was overcooked and dry
• Was asked if I wanted it madras-hot or hotter. Chose the former and it might as well not have had any chilli in at all. What a waste

Pilau rice: 7/10

• Nice and buttery, but not very spiced and a bit too al-dente for my taste

Rose Lassi: 8/10

• Delicious, like yoghurty turkish delight, but not cold enough

Venue: 7/10

• Bog standard curry house. Just what the doctor ordered

Service: 7/10

• Good. A little over-attentive but then I was the only customer in there at 6.30pm.
• Bloke who seemed to be the proprietor was a good lad. Had a wee chat about running a curry house. Had to lie and tell him the food was really good.

Value for money: 7/10

• Under 17 quid (ex. tip) for the lot seems reasonable

Kings Cross Tandoori, Grays Inn Road

Verdict Food: 6/10 Service: 7/10 Solo dinner ambience: 6/10

Hors d'oeuvres: Poppadoms

• Crunchy rather than just crispy. Seeming thicker than the usual ones
• Lime pickle - OK
• Mango chutney - fine, if a bit sweet
• Yoghurt thing - why oh why do curry houses insist on putting turmeric/saffron in the mint stuff? Temple has it right - a bit of mint is all you need
• Onion thing - appeared to contain cucumber, did not investigate as I fucking hate cucumber.

Starter: "Mixed Starter"

• Chicken/lamb tikka - well cooked but almost no spice flavour
• Sheekh kebab - dry, crumbly, fairly tasteless
• Onion bhaji - nice nutty flavour, almost a bit like falafel, but it fell apart upon contact and I was left hoovering up bits of overcooked onion from my plate
• Sizzler dish had far too much oil on it so the onions underneath all this were almost deep-fried rather than just softened and a bit burnt as is proper
• Garnish - generous wedge of lemon (no squeezy device though), wedge of tomato, bit of shredded lettuce

Main course: Lamb don't-remember-the-name (hot, sweet, sour with tamarind), pilau rice

• Alarming deep red, almost purple colour, like raw seekh kebab with too much food colouring
• Fair amount of oil floating on it
• Lamb not quite cooked to tenderness
• Sauce slightly sickly. Seems to have absorbed too much fat/oil.
• Sweet enough but not sour or hot enough
• Rice properly cooked, suitably fragrant, but a bit oily

Beverages Hard to go wrong with Perrier so I had no complaints, but they had just run out of Cobra and Kingfisher which left a lot of other unhappy customers drinking the abominable Bangla.

Bengal Berties, Ballards Lane

Verdict

Food: 7.5/10

Service: 7/10 Solo dinner ambience: 7/10

Hors d'oeuvres: Poppadoms

All bog standard, including the usual complaints about oversweet mango chutney (it's so easy to make I don't know why curry shops persist in buying big buckets of that sugary gunk), unnecessarily yellow minty yoghurt and bloody cucumber in the oniony stuff. I fucking hate cucumber.

Starter: Prawn puri

Puri was OK but should have been a bit more flaky and crispy. Contents were OK (appeared to use fresh prawns which is unusual) but not quite sour enough for my taste.

Main course: Lamb tikka dhansak, pilau rice, chana masala

Dhansak was OK - good heat, but not sour which was a bit of a disappointment. Meat in thin slices instead of chunks which worked well but again, not quite enough spicy marination goodness.

Rice was a bit greasy again, and not quite as fragrant is it should be IMHO.

Chana was good - nice nutty flavour with good texture. No sauce to speak of but still a good spiciness with a nice sour coriander/fenugreek thing going on.

Bevvies

Was in car so stuck with water. Didn't notice what other people were drinking. Did notice that the wine list had Bollinger for 35 GBP which has some potential for amusement.

The Bengal Lancer, Kentish Town Road

My weekly curry craving having come as early as Tuesday, I hop in the car and head over to Kentish Town to visit this place, which was recommended by a colleage.

From the outside, it looks like a high street Italian restaurant, complete with neon sign and floor-to-ceiling windows with cursive etching. Entering, I find the floor is tiled, the lighting soft but somehow unsympathetic. The walls (scuffed and bashed in places) support a mixture of ink-blot abstracts and traditional looking prints of what I take to be the Lancers. Several of the pictures are squint.

Within twenty seconds of sitting down, I have a basket of poppadoms and a tray of pickles (lime pickle, mango chutney, yoghurty stuff). This is more like it. My (adequate) mango lassi doesn't take long to arrive either.

The comically self-congratulatory menu arrives - one starter, comprising fried chicken livers, "you will not find anywhere else", (except the Bangalore Brasserie half a mile away) and one of the main courses ludicrously claims to contain "garden-fresh papaya".

To start, I have "Kon Jee Lamb". This is not like congee, but Chinese crispy shredded beef with lamb and no sauce. It is crispier than its Chinese analogue (that would be lamb rather than beef), very peppery, with fried onions and green peppers and juilienned carrots. There is a lot of it, and it is not bad. Being crispy it is rather harder to eat with a fork than it would be with chopsticks, so I stick it together with mango chutney.

Waiting for my main course I notice that two thirds of the customers (even excluding myself) are blokes eating on their own. This is usually an excellent indicator. I also realise why the place seems so lacking in atmosphere - there is no music. I am not a big fan of background music, but in a place with as little character as this a little would go a long way.

Next to arrive is "gosht kabul" (lamb with chick peas) and a lovely buttery pilao rice, very slightly saffron-y. The lamb is lean, the checkpeas nutty, both just a touch overcooked but the whole tastes more like Irish stew than curry - there simply isn't enough spice. That said, it's perfectly edible.

I plan to be home before Mrs Scoff returns from work, so I don't investigate desserts. The bill arrives fairly promptly when requested: ex. service, it is 18 quid, including a one pound cover charge for the poppadoms. I consider this cover thing is an excellent innovation.

Will I return? Probably not before I have tried other curry shops in the vicinity, but I wouldn't recommend against it.

Bangalore Brasserie, Brecknock Road

The sign outside is of the same design as "Curry Paradise" in Hampstead (which q.v.) and the menu seemed quite similar - maybe they have the same owner. The restaurant was quite pleasant inside for a bog-standard curry house, except for the slightly bilious yellow colour of the walls.

I opened with a couple of poppadoms about which there is not much to say, except perhaps that the lime pickle was made with fine shreds of lime peel rather than big lumps and had big bits of chilli too. It was slightly too salty for my taste, though.

Next the "mixed starter": three little bits of chicken tikka, three of lamb tikka and a small samosa. Meat was under-spiced and just a tiny bit undercooked (I like my tandoori quite dry). It came with minty yoghurt which was about the same colour as the aforementioned walls. Samosa was pretty good - dense and meaty - though also a bit under-spiced.

Main course just lamb dhansak and pilau rice. Dhansak looked good - appealingly dark colour, with still-separate chana dall rather than lentil-y sludge, slightly glossy with ghee but not oily - but it was a big disappointment. The sauce was bland, with none of the promised sourness, and the lamb was so fatty as to be quite unpleasant.

To drink, just a sweet lassi. This was excellent - sour, yoghurty, just a little bit sweet. My only complaint is that it was lukewarm rather than cold as usual.

At a shade under 16 quid, it was pretty good value, but I don't expect to return. Fortunately there are two more curry shops just over the road to try next.