Sweet and Spicy

I was disappointed with this place. I’d gone based on the other Yelp reviews and the hope of getting some reasonable food for a bit less money, but I didn’t save much and felt like the food I got was really lacklustre.

Okay, so this place probably is cheaper than the others, saving you maybe a pound or two on a curry and about 50p on some of the breads. But I’d question if it’s really worth it. The lower prices definitely impact on the food.

It’s served from big metal trays at the front of the store and then reheated in a microwave and brought over to you. I have nothing in theory against keeping the curries like this to server them, unless it affects the taste. Here it affected the taste, meaning that instead of sizzling hot curry that tasted as though it’d been on the boil for a few hours just before, you get something that was just kind of warm and felt like it had been made a long time ago.

The lamb korai had meat that was really tough, so there was no way you could break apart the big pieces with a fork and they just tasted dry and chewy. The sauces with them was thick and not too oily, but it didn’t have an especially exciting blend of spices. The Korai flavour was there, but it was a really muted version of it and nothing to get especially excited about. Rather than sitting in with the other flavours, the spice also stuck out starkly.

Saag (Spinach) dishes are some of my favourite of North Indian cuisine because the spinach can have such a strong, earthy, rich, vegetable flavour. Here though, the spinach in the sauce just tasted a little bit watery and limp.

We also had chapatti and paratha, both of which were microwaved to warm them. Of the two, the chapatti fared better. The paratha, because it had been fried and was more oily, came out of the microwave with that soggy greasiness that sausage rolls get when they’re reheated the same way.

Nothing was absolutely terrible (Hence 2* and not 1). It was just that I wouldn’t want to come back here in a hurry. I felt like this place could make much better food if it didn’t try so hard to keep it really cheap. If a bit more care was put into the preparation of the curries, and they were made that morning instead of days before, then all would be a lot better.

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