This was our first and last time at this Pakistani restaurant. It advertises itself as offering healthier, authentic Indian food so we decided on takeaway.
The overwhelming taste of my chicken makhani was sickly sugar sweet. This amount of sugar in this dish cannot be healthy or authentic. I mean this dish was a dessert.
This is meant to be a rich butter chicken dish nuanced with warm spice. That means for it to be authentic it should have butter in it. It should have spices in it. If there was butter in it I certainly couldn't taste it, nor did I see any butter oil. If it had spices then sugar killed any spice taste.
Marks & Spencer sells a mass produced, industrially made, butter chicken which is far more tasty than this rubbish and by a long way. It's much cheaper too.
It doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. The tandoor style chicken in it is in good ratio to the butter makhani sauce and it's not sugar laden.
My take out makhani had no curry hit at all, no discernible spice at all, no warmth not even a hint. It cost £8.10 (£9 less 10% discount booking on line) and it was just a vile sugar rush.
For the chicken in this makhani dish to be authentic it is meant to be marinated in cream, yoghurt and spices for several hours. This chicken wasn't.
The spices for an authentic butter chicken dish usually include garam masala, ginger, garlic, lemon (better still lime) pepper, coriander, cumin, turmeric and a bit of chilli.
I couldn't detect a scintilla of any of the above but I do recommend the M&S butter chicken to those who cook or serve in this restaurant and I advise they use far less sugar in their makhani, tikka masala and korma.
I would have settled for a bit of fresh ginger and fresh lemon juice, just something that would at least cut the unhealthy, cloying sweetness.
I just thought as I went to the food bin; here we go again; another so called authentic, healthy restaurant where literally no expense is spent, with the cheapest food being made by the gallon including the generous use of cheap artificial food colourings yet priced as high as they think they can get away with.
So to be much more accurate the menu should say artificially coloured red chicken breast pieces in a quarter pint of artificially coloured sugar solution masking as a 'sauce' which may or may not have traces of garam masala, ginger, garlic, lemon, pepper, coriander, cumin, turmeric & chilli.
There was about a quarter pint of liquid 'sauce' in the carton. This 'sauce' solidified when it went cold. If they have a tandoor oven here then they didn't use it to cook the chicken or the nan bread.
The plain nan bread (£1.60 after discount) was pretty darn good. It was a good size and well heat - blistered under a hot grill, but not in a tandoor.
The photo shows that the chicken breast meat was an unnatural vivid red to mimic marinade & tandoor oven cooking, so they know what they aren't doing sufficiently enough to pretend that they are and charge accordingly.
There are a number of chemical dyes used to produce vivid red: Allura red (E129), an orange-red dye; Carmoisine (E122), a red colouring in jellies; Ponceau 4R (E124), a red colouring; Quinoline yellow (E104), and Sunset yellow (E110), both colourings; and Tartrazine (E102).
The near £9 price tag for my main included boiled, artificially coloured pilau rice or a plain grilled nan bread.
It was disconcerting too to find that the sugar solution 'sauce' was a weird yellow/orange colour: almost Bart Simpson yellow.
I imagined Homer Simpson eating this served up as the colour would be perfect. He'd say 'Oooh sugar' I've attached a photo. It looks well in my food bin where most of it finished up.
My guess is that the 'sauce' was constructed by mixing the artificially yellow korma and artificially red tikka masala sauces together.
My wife and son each had a dry chicken tikka main at just under £8 so their artificially red chicken breast pieces were the same as mine.
Again no tandoor was used nor harmed in the production of what my family described as really awful food.
The tikka chicken had some sliced translucent onions, a tad of fresh coriander bits, and a light film of vegetable oil pooled in the bottom of the containers.
This chicken tikka is meant to come with a vegetable curry. What they each got was a container of red watery liquid (food colouring again?) with some overcooked cubed potato and pre frozen green beans.
Like my dish each container had about a quarter pint of vivid red liquid. It looked as awful as it tasted. I've attached a photo. It's also rare for us to leave most of our food but quite frankly this was rubbish.
My boiled rice order was perfectly cooked and tasted wonderful. This was an experience we'll never again repeat.
So I asked what everyone thought of the food. The verdict was: terrible. It's not often we are all in agreement, but we all know muck when we see it and we know when we are being ripped off. read more
