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Ask anyone who lives in West London where their favourite Indian restaurant is, and they will very likely point you towards Southall. Try to convince anyone who lives anywhere outside West London to travel to Southall for dinner, however, and you may encounter some quite understandable resistance. My God, it's a journey. From Clapham Junction I boarded one of those rickety branch lines that seem to run once every second Thursday, which got as far as some godforsaken place called Brentford. From there, the 195 bus meandered on a leisurely arc through dark suburbs until finally, one and a half hours later, it pulled up outside the Brilliant. "It better bloody had be", I thought as I slunk inside.
It all started so well. Worryingly well, in fact. The selection of house pickles at the Brilliant contains some of the most astonishing flavours I've had the pleasure of eating, including a mixed pickle in a subtly nutty (sesame?) oil and a fantastically strong lemon concoction which cleansed the palate better than any amuse bouche. All home made (apart from the more workaday mango chutney) and remarkably fresh, these really were impressive, and along with a half pint of the house passion fruit juice (also freshly made) all signs pointed towards this being a very good dinner. The possibility began to dawn that I'd be having to make quite a few of those nightmare journeys if this really was as good as it gets in London. Cripes.
But then, with reassuring mediocrity, the mixed grill arrived. Actually perhaps that's unfair - some of it was pretty good, particularly the lamb chops which were nicely charred on the outside and almost sausagey in texture inside, and the prawns were also well timed, the flesh having moisture and bounce if not being particularly strongly spiced. But chicken tikka pieces were watery (literally - I don't know where all that liquid was coming from but it seemed rather unnatural) and bland despite the skilful grilling, and seekh kebabs were similarly dull. It was all just a bit tame, and although it was all perfectly nice in a kind of family-friendly way, there was nothing particularly exciting. At £15, too, it was certainly at the upper end of what I'd expect to pay for this kind of food.
The best bits of the main courses were very good. A vegetable biryani had a lovely vinegary gloss to it, nice crunchy vegetables, and a decent tomato/curry sauce on the side. And a dish of butter chicken in some kind of tomato sauce (sorry we had somehow managed to order this one "off menu" and I can't remember exactly what went into it) was genuinely delicious, with complex spicing and tender pieces of grilled meat. I should also mention the bhatura bread, which was as fluffy and rich as you could want and made soaking up the leftover curry sauce extremely enjoyable.
On the other hand, there was a pretty horrible bowl of paneer, which consisted of lumps of flavourless cheese in a sauce of unseasoned spinach, the whole lot tasting not unlike green wallpaper paste. And Papri Chaat was a cold, claggy lump of grainy chickpea patty soaked in low fat yoghurt that I could barely take more than a mouthful of before gagging.
So, a mixed bag then. Some good stuff, some not so good. And ordinarily this wouldn't be too much of a problem - after all, even average Indian cooking is streets ahead of most other types of cuisine - if it wasn't for the hellish journey required to get here (for most of us, at least) and - most importantly - the price. At £70 for two with no alcohol, this was not a cheap meal, and I can think of a good handful of other Asian restaurants that you could enjoy a decent mixed grill with bread and a couple of mains for literally half that amount. In fact, I can think of one restaurant in particular, in a comparably remote corner of the capital, where I did just that last week. And it's there, and not the Brilliant, that I will be returning next time I'm in need of some lamb chops and seekh kebabs. Come on now, you didn't honestly think I would get through a review of a curry house without mentioning Tayyabs, did you?
6/10
No matter how many miles you would happily travel for a good meal, how close your house or flat is to your favourite local restaurant or how good you are at whipping up a hearty dinner for ten in seconds flat, sometimes there's absolutely nothing better than kicking back in your own front room on a Saturday evening and tucking into a takeaway curry. When I first moved to London, I made a concerted effort to try all the local delivery places at least once so that if the opportunity arose I wouldn't inflict visiting friends and family with oily kebabs and soggy naans and send them back up North muttering about the standard of London food. A good, reliable delivery place is a valuable thing, as indispensible as a decent local minicab or a 24-hour off-licence in its contributions to a happy night in, and with that in mind I'd like to introduce you to the finest delivery service in East London - Curry Capital.
As with most of these places, the menu from Curry Capital is a mixture of familiar curry house favourites and the odd house speciality. It reads, let's be honest, like it could belong on any high street in the country, not just London, and is hardly the kind of thing to set pulses racing. But its strength isn't in the ambition of its Indian-Bangladeshi cuisine or the application of unusual techniques and ingredients - it's just that the main dishes from here are as good as I've had even in the best Indian restaurants in town, with a level of spicing and use of brilliant fresh ingredients that only seem to improve each time we make an order.
One item we never do without is the Lamb Xacuti. "Award winning" it's described on the menu, and we'll have to give them the benefit of the doubt, because it really is stunning. Tender strips of slow-cooked lamb rest in a thick spicy paste, slightly oiler than the Tayyabs dry meat perhaps but with almost the same level of meaty intensity. This week we also tried something called 'Kathmandu delicacy chicken', containing impossibly moist and tasty strips of grilled chicken in a fiery tomato/chilli sauce, as addictive and delicious as you could imagine. As if that wasn't enough, a starter portion of 'Mitah Changri' - tender king prawns in a sauce containing honey and fresh lime, amongst I'm sure many other things - was also superb, benefitting from wonderful fresh ingredients and a masterful command of spicing.
I should point out that I've never eaten in at their restaurant on Brick Lane - despite the excellent food coming out of their kitchens, that address is anathema to any self-respecting Londoner; if I'm going to leave the house for a meal I'll just keep walking to Whitechapel. But for those of you lucky enough to live within delivery distance I can only suggest next time you're in the mood for a lazy evening of curry-based indulgence and don't fancy leaving the flat, give them a call. And if you're reading this thinking "my favourite place looks better than that" then let me know and I'll give it a try - if it turns out you're right I'll be forever indebted. But after years of systematic testing of London's food delivery options, I can confidently say that operations like Curry Capital don't come along very often, and I consider myself its most loyal, and happiest, customer.
8/10
The insurmountable dilemma facing any new Pakistani grill house - in fact, let's face it, the problem with most existing Pakistani grill houses - is the continued existence of Tayyabs. I'd be quite happy to visit Lahore Kebab or Mirch Masala or even the Maedah Grill far more often that I currently do, if it wasn't for the fact that Tayyabs quite simply makes everything, from the lamb chops to the Karahi Chicken, better than anywhere else. Sure it's a pain to get to and to get in, the smoke from the iron skillets burns your eyes and impregnates your clothes and you will be sat so close to fellow diners that you may as well be sharing the same plate, but there's a reason punters put up with such physical and emotional torment - it all fades into insignificance as soon as the first bite of dry meat passes your lips. Tayyabs is the benchmark for Pakistani grills, its consistently wonderful food and remarkably successful business model hanging over every other pretender in the capital. "If Tayyabs can do it, why can't you?"
So you have to feel for Lahori Masala, brand new on Commercial St on the site of an old wholesale cash & carry. You can't fault their ambition - this is a 600-cover restaurant. I'll say that again - six hundred covers. That's only slightly less than London's largest restaurant Gilgamesh which I think can cram in 800-odd. And the staff last night were lovely, attentive and friendly and obviously very proud of their gleaming new venture. But how would they compare? And more to the point, how could anywhere serving lamb chops and chicken tandoori pieces ever think they would not be compared to the granddaddy of them all on Fieldgate St? We decided not to ignore the elephant in the room, and in the interests of fairness ordered a selection of Tayyabs staples (lamb chops, seekh kebabs, dhal) and a couple of bowls of curry - a sag gosht and a bindi chicken.
First to arrive, though, were the popadums. All fried rather than Tayyabs' mix of fried and baked, and of the unspiced variety, they nevertheless went well with the fiery house pickles, particularly their home made tomato chilli sauce. I also think even Tayyabs could learn from the option of lime pickle - I love that stuff.
It's probably no shock to learn that the mains weren't as good as the Tayyabs' versions, but they really weren't that bad at all. Tayyabs has set the bar so high it's easy to get complacent at the otherwise pretty decent food being served elsewhere, and although the Lahori seekh kebabs and lamb chops were tamer, less confidently prepared (the kebabs in particular needed crisping up a bit more on the outside) and ran the risk of being a sad reminder of the Other Place, the fact is this stuff is all still fairly tasty. Also arriving with the starters was something Tayyabs doesn't do at all - tandoori chicken wings - and these were superb, crisply charred and powerfully marinated.
Mains were more mixed. Both the sag gosht and the bindi chicken ran the risk of collapsing under the weight of their own grease, but had a good flavour and perfectly fresh ingredients. The chicken cubes in particular were lovely and moist. The dahl was more disappointing, requiring far more seasoning to be anything approaching tasty. It was a bit like eating yellow wallpaper paste.
In the end, the biggest mark against Lahori Masala is that it's not Tayyabs, and I understand completely why you might prefer to keep walking down Commercial Road into Whitechapel. But really, we should consider ourselves lucky - I have a feeling that none of these other places would be anywhere near as good if it wasn't for Tayyabs. You need a market leader to shake up the system and show everyone else how it's done - look at the way Hawksmoor proved that there was such a thing as a world-class British steakhouse, or how Cay Tre made the wonder of cheap, authentic Vietnamese food available to Londoners. If the worst you can say about Lahori is that it's not Tayyabs, then really, that's not much of a criticism at all. I can almost recommend it - at least you won't have to queue.
6/10
I had hoped, in the spirit of other far more prolific gastronomes, to do a roundup of all my dining highlights of 2009 in the form of a categorised list, instead of choosing just one "Restaurant of the Year". It was partly because I didn't want to bore people with yet another gushing exaltation to Rules, but I was also curious as to whether even I could reliably recall meals and dishes from the first few months of 2009 - even El Bulli seems like a lifetime ago, never mind my first trip to the wonderful Harwood Arms in February.
But all my good intentions came to naught almost as soon as I began. Here's my draft of the first few categories:
Best restaurant overall - Rules
Best individual dish - Roast Grouse at Rules
Best bar - Brian Silva's Rules Bar
...at which point I thought "this is silly" and gave up. However although Rules does remain my favourite drinking and dining spot overall, there was some pretty fierce competition. Here, then, in no particular order, are some other things I enjoyed in 2009:
- A day trip to Whitstable and a four-hour "blind" tasting menu at the Sportsman was certainly one of the highlights of the year, and is most definitely on my "to do again" list for 2010. We were the first to arrive and the last to leave, and at no point did we get the impression they wouldn't have been happy to see us spend the night...
- Tayyabs remains as addictive and reliably enchanting as it is infuriatingly popular, but then it's when you don't see them queuing round the block in Whitechapel you have to start getting worried. The lamb chops and dry meat remain works of near-genius.
- It's still hard to resist hugging myself with self-satisfied glee at the existence of the Lavender Hill branch of Mien Tay. The friendly but slightly shambolic service and functional décor hide a skilled and generous kitchen. I've been about twenty times since October.
- Exhilarating and challenging Sichuan food in Chilli Cool, Snazz Sichuan (not reviewed) and Gourmet San, where I discovered that there is no dish that can't be improved by the addition of pig.
- A handful of equally satisfying (and stunningly good value) dim sum meals at such varied sites as New Cross, Elephant & Castle and Greenwich. Dim sum chefs train for years, the food is intricate and precise and delicately and uniquely flavoured, and it is a complete mystery why it's all so incredibly cheap. But you won't hear me complaining.
- A hugely enjoyable (and wallet-burstingly expensive) evening at the Pierre Koffman popup, in a room seemingly populated exclusively by food bloggers and journalists.
- And of course, there's that little trip to Spain in September. I didn't enjoy all of it, and in fact hated some of it, but I can't say I still don't feel privileged to have been.
So that was 2009. Many thanks once again for everyone reading the blog and following me on Twitter, and with any luck 2010 should bring even more potential delights, disasters and Ibérico ham tastings (that last wish is mainly for selfish reasons). Here's to next year - it's been a blast.
I don't have a problem with the ex-restaurant manager of Tayyabs setting up his own restaurant. I don't have a problem with the carbon-copy menu, the suspiciously familiar décor, tableware, table setting, water jugs, black-clad waiters, etc. etc.. What does irritate me, however, is its location. 90% of London is crying out for a decent Pakistani grill. Nobody outside of certain parts of Tooting or Southall can get their fix of seekh kebabs or dry meat, and Needoo Grill could have done a public service by bringing their mixed grills to Battersea or East Dulwich or Hampstead or Paddington. Instead, this Tayyabs-clone is parked literally around the corner from the mothership, on New Road - about 30 steps away. So now Whitechapel has Tayyabs, Needoo Grill, Lahore Kebab House AND Mirch Masala, and the rest of London can get stuffed and go to Masala Zone. Thanks very much, Needoo.
You can see their reasoning though. Tayyabs, despite the huge new basement room, is still vastly oversubscribed. I spotted a queue out of the door at 6pm last night, and even if Needoo existed purely as a kind of unofficial Tayyabs overflow, I'm sure it would still make a killing. But what Needoo does not have, so far at least, is any strong case for being destination number one instead of one-and-a-half. Let's begin at the beginning.
House popadums were served with the familiar "ooh wonder where I've seen those before?" array of dips, but had some pleasingly subtle variations. The yoghurt-y mint dip was particularly nice, sweet and fresh with a lovely vinegar kick. The popadums themselves were as you might expect, perfectly good, and only the vegetables were a bit disappointing, the cucumber being a bit old and dry.
The mixed grill certainly looked the part, and the seekh kebabs, at the very least, were as good as any I've tried, moist and lean and packing a decent chilli punch. But the chicken tikka pieces, though spiced perfectly well, were rather dry, and the lamb chops were not in the same league as the Other Place at all, being too sweet and sloppy and missing an extra layer of hot spices. I still wolfed it all down, of course, Tayyabs on a bad day being at least a thousand times better than most other ways to spend your food money in London, but you can clearly see the difference thirty-odd years experience can make.
Karahi chicken was also rather dispiriting - tiny, dry pieces of chicken in a relatively tasty but rather oily sauce - but it arrived with two of the loveliest roti I've ever had the pleasure to eat. Expertly cooked to split-second perfection, with a very healthy pattern of delicate browned bubbles on the surface, these were supremely light, bursting with flavour and with an extraordinary texture contrast between the brittle surface and the doughy insides. I may have issues with the protein at Needoos but someone definitely knows what they're doing in the bread department.
In conclusion, then, what we have here is a perfectly decent, friendly and convenient place to try after the queue for Tayyabs reaches the 45-minute mark, and I didn't begrudge at all one penny of the pathetic £8 or so my meal cost last night. There's a tendency, when faced with the embarrassment of riches that are the grill houses of Whitechapel, to compare one with the other and of course this is fine - a bit of healthy competition is probably why they're all so good in the first place. But it was while tucking into my lamb chops a thought struck me - if this had been served anywhere in London other than Whitechapel, and I didn't have anything better to compare it to, I would have declared it the finest culinary discovery of the decade. In the name of all that is good, and on behalf of the poor deprived residents of Battersea and elsewhere, can one of you lot please consider opening further afield? We're waiting for you, you know.
8/10
It is perhaps a sign of these credit-crunchy times that, for me at least, 2008 was not quite as chock-full of Michelin starred, multi-course blowouts as 2007. And when I did occasionally push the boat out, results were mixed to say the least. Under the "disappointing and expensive" category are Texture, Quo Vadis, St John, Le Bouchon Breton and Andaman, all of which managed to present a bill of at least £70 a head and serve food which although not exactly bad came far short of being value for money. Only one fine dining restaurant - The Square, in Mayfair - do I consider worthy of the stratospheric prices they charge, and I hope to goodness that they steer a course through the tricky economic waters of 2009 as I intend to visit again as soon as my bank balance allows it. As for the others, well, we may be about to see a kind of culinary Darwinism at work. I would keep a close eye on some of those names above and see how many are here in twelve months time.
But I am not going to make The Square my Restaurant of the Year. Yes, it's served three of the best meals I've ever eaten, with dishes so perfectly judged in terms of presentation and taste that they can scarcely be bettered in the country, but at £100 a head that's exactly what you'd expect. Likewise Hawksmoor, which dishes out beautifully cooked steaks and wonderful cocktails and has become almost a second home for me in the last few months, but again you would damn well hope so too at £30 a plate, plus extra for chips. The Square and Hawksmoor have hit just the right point on the value for money graph and I'm quite happy for them, but perhaps a truly great restaurant needs something more - not just an ability to meet expectations but smash them into a billion pieces, and not just once or occasionally but again and again and again. And with that in mind, there could only ever really be one winner.
I have in the past moaned about the queues at Tayyab's, even going so far as to suggest an alternative to the daily scrum on Fieldgate Street. The crowds start congregating around 6pm, and by 7:30 or so they snake around the inside of the restaurant, past the sweet counter and back again and sometimes even out into the street, hundreds strong, day after day. And if you have to ask what restaurant in the world can possibly deserve this kind of fanatical devotion, then you haven't eaten there. Juicy, spicy seekh kebabs; sizzling hot platters of bright red lamb chops coated in addictive tandoori spicing that stain your hands for hours afterwards; masala fish which manages to be crispy on the outside and fluffy and moist inside, the robust spicing never overpowering the tilapia meat itself; and dry meat - oh, the dry meat. A heavenly concoction of spices and stock, reduced for so long it's become almost a concentrated meat purée, and yet containing chunks of miraculously tender lamb, the Tayyab's dry meat is a monumental achievement. It is also, as far as I am aware, unique to this restaurant.
One of Tayyabs' biggest fans, and this is saying something for a restaurant whose Facebook 'Appreciation Group' has over 1,000 members, is Gavin Baxter, who has been a regular since far before it became trendy amongst bandwagon-jumping foodies such as myself. Along with other members of the Opinionated About Forums he was an early advocate of the then still relatively unknown Pakistani grill house and was there for the ride as it expanded from a tiny canteen in an old newsagents to the former pub next door and subsequent fame and glory. Gavin signs off his OA forum posts with a quote from Benjamin Franklin on beer; it also struck me as an appropriate final word on my 2008 Restaurant of the Year, with one small alteration:
"Tayyab's is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy"
Looking forward to 2009, there are no prizes of any kind for guessing what I'm expecting this year's highlight to be. I'm afraid there are no available spaces for the trip to El Bulli in September, but rest assured I will write it all up in as much detail as circumstances allow, and I'll be thinking of everyone who didn't win the email lottery as I tuck into my spherical olives. I also promise to not be too smug and keep going on about it.
So, final "thank you"s to Simon Majumdar for mentioning me in the Times Online, to Niamh of Eat Like A Girl and Trusted Places, Helen of FoodStories, Lizzie of Hollow Legs, Charles and Joel of Tipped, Andy Hayler, Silverbrow and of course to everyone else following Cheese and Biscuits in such frankly baffling numbers. I hope you find enough here to entertain you in the year ahead. Cheers, and have a Melón con jamón on me:
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Well, you could have knocked me down with a poppadum. For weeks, if not months, a friend of mine had been trying to persuade me to try Mirch Masala on Commercial Street, and of course I thought the very idea was insane. "Why on earth," I would say, "if I was going to eat anywhere in Whitechapel, would I go anywhere other than Tayyabs?". And given the sheer consistency and quality of the food there, I think you would agree I had a point. But more recently the buzz of recommendations for Mirch Masala had reached a even more deafening level as I learned a couple of colleagues at work at been and declared it (brace yourselves) "possibly" even better than Tayyabs. So that was that - on Friday evening I wandered down.
The menu was reassuringly Tayyabs-like in style, though perhaps slightly more extensive with a much larger vegetarian selection and some interesting Karahi options. We ordered a plate of sizzling lamb and chicken wing tikka, and on arrival you could immediately tell this was a kitchen with a supreme command of the grill. They were - and it almost pains me to say it - every bit as good as the grill from Tayyabs, succulent and salty and dripping with fantastic tandoori spicing.
The chilli naan was decent enough (nothing has yet beaten the garlic naan from Lahore over the road in my book, it's just a shame everything else there doesn't live up to it) but the Masala Bhindi was amazingly rich and meaty for a dish containing no meat, and the Karahi Chilli Chicken, despite containing slightly dry pieces of chicken, had such a wonderful tomatoey, herby sauce that I almost licked the bowl clean. Great stuff.
So, and here comes something I never thought I'd say, Mirch Masala may have done enough to replace Tayyabs as my curry house of choice in the East End. It's not just because of the food, either - although Mirch will certainly give them a run for their money. The problem is, thanks to people like me going on about how good Tayyabs is, it's more or less impossible to get in these days unless you turn up at 5:30pm or are willing to wait for two hours. And once you're in, securing a spot with enough room to use your elbows and not have people knocking you on the back of the head on the way to the toilets is yet another challenge. Mirch Masala serves tasty, cheap food (our feast for two came to £19 in total) in infinitely more relaxed (if rather canteen-y) surroundings and is a big enough restaurant that you don't have to sprint there after work to get a table. It has everything going for it. Let's just see how long it takes for the rest of the city to catch on... can you keep a secret?
8/10
