Two curries last week, both of which from chains. The first was at the Baluchi on Spring Street, Soho (menu). I'd been to the downtown one a year or so ago and this one is very similar in appearance. The bar, tables and much decor are of dark carved wood, serving dishes, water cups and cutlery handles are copper, floor and walls are dark red and terracotta.
A couple of spiced poppadoms appear, with a mango chutney (light and syrupy with some big chunks of perhaps uncoooked mango), tamarind chutney (seems to be standard in the US, and not bad) and the usual yoghurty thing.
The menu is a bit narrow but the curries seem to show a rather greater range than the usual English variations-on-a-heavy-theme curry house menu.
I opened with the Tandoori Combination Platter, which wasn't bad. A big sizzler plate with a couple of big bits (not far short of 2" cubes) of each of (what in the UK would be called) lamb tikka, chicken tikka and tandoori chicken and a big deep-fried prawn thing stuffed with cream cheese. The meat was pretty good — nicely cooked, well marinated, if anything the bits were a bit too big to have taken enough spice flavour. The prawn thing was weird. A single king or tiger prawn, butterflied, stuck to a big lump of cream cheese deep-fried. Even allowing for the theoretical possibilty of cream-cheese having a purpose to its existence it was a bit of deep-fried pointlessness with a limp not-that-big prawn attached.
Main course, just the lamb rogan josh with peas pulao. The curry tasted fine, but the meat was gristly in parts and the sauce had no real body. Rice was stuck together, had no spice flavour and a few garden peas scattered on top.
To drink, a couple of OK mango lassis.
The bill was just about reasonable value at about 36 USD but the whole experience was a bit lacking, nevertheless.
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