Benares - An East meets West love story

When I was a youngster, I was lucky enough to be exposed to all sorts of food. My parents have always loved eating and I learned to appreciate food from all over the world. I may have been principally a fussy eater, but one of my favourite cuisines was Indian food. Fuelled with my dads love of it, it appeared regularly as a dinner option. Thing is, the regularity of this meal started to wear me out, and over the years, I guess you can say that my interest had waned.

Dishoom Chowpatty Beach Bar, Southbank

Pop ups seem to be becoming all the rage. A chance to do something a bit different. In a couple of weeks time, Dishoom (the popular "Bombay Cafe") opens it's doors to it's first venture outside Covent Garden. Taking over an old artists studio, it is invading the Southbank with a Chowpatty Beach popup, named after the eponymous beach in Bombay, and I was lucky enough to be asked along for a sneak preview.

Delhi Grill: A taste of India in Islington

According to my cousin-in-law, a Texas lad living in New York, America's Indian restaurant scene is pretty rubbish. Quite surprising for such a cosmopolitan city to have such a low incidence of quality Indian food when London is scattered with great food originating from around the Indian sub continent. So, when they came to visit this past weekend (2 young children in tow), it was left up to me to find a suitable location for us all to eat.

Delhi Grill is a self styled "Indian canteen" (or dhaba), and serving a small (albeit focused) menu from the tandoor and from the pot, and seemed a good place to take my family. After a small issue with numbers (my fault due to more people turning up), we managed to get all 9 of us round a table and started to tuck in.

We managed to pretty much order everything. An assortment of grilled meats from the tandoor were delicately spiced and rather delicious. The sheekh kebabs were extremely tender, falling apart but packed with flavour and the lamb chops had a similar melt-in-the-mouth consistency. All meats, I am told, are marinated overnight in a traditional recipe and are packed with spice. The assortment of chutneys are well received, with the beetroot based chutney especially popular with the three year old (we told her it was special ketchup, she devoured it).

From the pot, we ordered all the meat curries and a selection of the veggies off the specials menu. Out of all the food we ordered, I think I was probably least impressed with the curries. They appeared very heavy on sauce and we were often left fishing around to see if there was any meat left towards the bottom of the serving dish. Personally, I like my curries a little on the drier side.

The veggie dishes were rather good though. I believe that it was during the Indian harvest festival (baisakhi) so the majority of the specials were vegetarian dishes and bloody great they were too. Saag (spinach) came with two lumps of butter to really make it rich and velvety, and the aubergine (baingan) was smoky like a Lebanese babaganoush, but rich in Indian spices. Best of all was the tarka dhal which is made from yellow lentils, packed with garlic, coriander and cumin. It has always been a personal favourite and between my dad and I, we mopped this all up with the wonderful naan bread.

I can certainly see what the fuss is about at Delhi Grill. The food is great and is definitely a step above your standard curry house fare. I liked that it concentrates on a few good dishes and the rotating specials board should not be ignored. They coped admirably with the demands of our rather demanding table and costing just under £100 for a table of 7 adults (and two children), I think it smacks of exceedingly good value.

Delhi Grill - 21 Chapel Market, Islington, London N1

A Bombay cafe in London: Dishoom abridged

I go to lots of places to eat, all in the name of research *ahem*, but finding the time and energy to write them all up can be quite draining. I know, I am just making excuses, and I like to waffle on with the best of them. After all I spent three years at university doing a Geography degree perfecting the art of writing 3000 words on nothing much at all. However, I realise that not everyone wants to read an essay (and hell, I don't want to write one) so I will make an effort to post more regularly, but write less.

Dishoom is a Bombay cafe located in the heartland that is Upper St Martins lane, very handily located in between Covent Garden and Leicester Square. After a fair outporing of love on twitter, I felt a visit was required and popped in for a quick dinner. Ordering way too much seems to be my modus operandi and between me and my friend, probably ordered enough for three.

A variety of dishes landed in front of us at an alarming rate. Within 5 minutes of ordering, our entire order of breads, meats, sides and dal appeared on our table. I now understood the little metal stand brought to our table, used to stack dishes on top of each other. Our table simply wouldn't have coped. Highlight for me was a delicious chicken tikka, nicely spiced with a nice char, although all the food was competent and enjoyable.

I find it very hard to gush about Dishoom but I did enjoy my ultra quick meal. A handy place for a quick tasty dinner and a darn sight better than nearly every other place in the immediate vicinity. At just under £50 for enough food for about two and a half people plus 3 cocktails, it's pretty decent value and well worth a visit.

Dishoom - 12 Upper St Martins Lane, WC2H 9FB

Eat Indian: Tayyabs, Whitechapel

The time had finally come. After a while waiting to go and after reading numerous food blogs about how great it was, the day had finally arrived. I finally made it to Tayyabs.

Tayyab's is a Pakistani restaurant located just east of Aldgate, at the bottom end of Brick Lane. I would love to claim that this is one of London’s hidden gems but its reputation proceeds and if you ask almost anybody about where a good curry house is, if they know anything about food, this place isn’t often far off the end off their tongue.

Anyway, enough of all the vacillating, all you really want to know was if this place was any good. On arrival, our table wasn’t ready but even at 7.30 on a Wednesday night (incidentally when the Champions League Final was on) a queue was forming to get a table.


As there were 8 in my party, we pretty much got away with ordering a bit of everything. The ordering itself was a bit manic. The waiter came over and pretty much ordered for us but I don’t think anybody was really complaining.


First up was the mixed grill. This was made up of some seek kebabs, some chicken tikka and probably the most amazing lamb chops I have ever had. These bits of meat were little pieces of charcoal licked heaven. Excellent spicing on the lamb chops had me chewing the bones.





To follow, a bunch of curry turned up. We had lamb curry, chicken Tikka Masala, Tarka Dal, some okra and saag aloo. As you can see from the pics, these were not as oily as you would expect from your local takeaway, but this is not your ordinary takeaway. In general, everything was good. The curries had a really nice thick sauce, not the watery drivel you normally find. The veggie dishes still had plenty of bite to them and you could taste the vegetables. Nan bread wasn’t like any other nan I had eaten before. They were delicious, thin and crispy. The rice was a bit watery and poor but I think we can let that one go.

I had a lovely time here. The food was very good and I will be dreaming about those lamb chops for a long time to come. Service may not have been fantastic but is no worse than you would expect from any high street restaurant. Biggest surprise of the evening, the bill. It came to just over a tenner a head and considering the amount of food we ate, this was an absolute steal. Great value, great food and even the dogs outside hadn’t left a scrap on the bones they were chewing.

Details
Tayyabs
83-89 Fieldgate St.
London E1 1JU

Indian Food - The land of curry, tandoors and the Gola!

Tayyabs (E1/£20)
Delhi Grill (N1/£20)
Dishoom (Bombay cafe/WC2/£20)
Dishoom (Chowpatty beach popup/£10)

Key - (Info/Location/Rough price per head with no alcohol)