This place is the business. It's new enough, having replaced the Japanese place that used to sit on the corner, and I'm hoping it will succeed. That said, I think they have a kink or two to work out.
Having never eaten Pakistani food before (I'm not very adventurous), I was a little wary of eating here. However, I did not regret it (and even insisted we go back again later in the week). The naan bread seems to be fresh baked in-house. If it's not, wherever they get it from knows what they're doing. They also bring warm poppadoms and little pots of dipping sauces to the table after you've ordered. The mango chutney is lovely, but the sauces seem to change from day-to-day. The curries on their menu are to die for and they're perfectly happy to let you substitute lamb for beef or vegetables, so make sure you ask if there's a combination you want but isn't available on the menu. The starters are also insanely good. I'd recommend the chicken roll thingies -- not quite sure of the proper name! -- and the onion bhaji. Though again, the starters seem to change quite regularly.
Pricewise, it's not too expensive, and it's downright decent if you're ordering from the lunch menu. We payed 140e for four of us and that included a bottle of wine.
Right, the food was exceptional, so I suppose I should explain the missing stars...
On the two occasions I've been there, the service has been awful. The servers are nice, and friendly enough, but the wait time between courses is astonishingly long. We arrived for lunch at 1pm on a Friday and did not finish until 415pm. This was nothing to do with us lazing about over each course. We didn't rush ourselves but were still left waiting 30 minutes between each course. At the end, we literally inhaled our desserts (when they finally came) and got the hell out of there. In my opinion, over three hours is far, far too long for a weekday lunch. I can't imagine if we'd actually been in work that day (one of us was and he had to leave halfway through the meal). This slowness was something we had noticed the first time we were there but we figured it being 1pm on a Sunday (and us having nowhere to be), they may not have had a lot of kitchen staff working. We were disappointed to see the problem persisted on a Friday afternoon.
The second gripe was that they served us very obviously gone off cream in our desserts. The first time around we had ordered a dessert from the menu that was absolutely fabulous. All it was was strawberries and fresh cream but it was presented so beautifully in a martini glass that we couldn't resist getting it again. At first, the waitress forgot our order (I am not sure how, at this point we were the only customers). After 15 minutes we reminded her and she was apologetic. She went straight to the kitchen and five minutes later she came back with our desserts. Unfortunately, it looked nothing like it had the first time. The cream looked sour (it had that curdled, lumpy appearance to it) and while the strawberries were supposed to be standing upright in a nice circular pattern, the cream wasn't stiff enough to support it, so they were just sitting in the bottom of the glass, with the gloopy, sloppy cream poured all over it. We thought it looked bad but risked a taste anyway. BAD move. We informed the waitress that the cream was 'off' and she immediately replaced our dessert (this time subbing in ice cream). Still, we can't figure out how the person making it didn't realise the cream was gone when he made it. It was so clearly bad.
Despite these shortcomings, I am eager to return (that's how genuinely good the food is!!). I hope all of the above is just growing pains and they've worked it out by now (this was back in February). It would be a shame to seem them fail for something so fixable. read more
