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.
No comments:
Post a Comment