It’s time to check out the famous London Indian restaurants

These days I go to London relatively rarely so I try and spend the few meals I have in the city at new restaurants just to get a sense of what’s happening in the food scene.

My trip last week was no exception. I went to the new MiKo on Curzon street for delicious Thai food and I was impressed by what the new owner Jeremy King had done with Simpson’s in the Strand, one of the city’s oldest surviving great restaurants.

 

But while I was planning my trip I had a thought: when I do eat Indian in London I tend to go to the old favourites (anything set up by the Panjabi sisters, Hoppers, Quilon and Jamavar) and rarely try anything unfamiliar. In fact there are many famous London Indian restaurants that I have never set foot in. It was time to check them out.

 

   I started with The Cinnamon Club which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. It’s less the sort of restaurant that visiting Indians go to and more a favourite of the British political establishment (Parliament is next door and the restaurant is packed out at lunchtime with MPs and ministers.)

 

   It is run by one of the UK’s leading Indian chefs, Vivek Singh, who Asma Khan calls the nicest chef in the business: when Asma was starting out, Vivek let her host dinners in the restaurant and helped her understand what it was like to cook at this level.

 

   I was 25 years too late to review the restaurant (Vivek’s group now has five restaurants) but it exceeded my expectations on every level. It’s located in an old library (there are still books on the shelves), is wonderfully atmospheric despite its size (it can seat 200 guests with ease) and Vivek turned out to be even nicer and more modest than Asma had said.

 

   The food was very good: deer from the Balmoral estate with masala mash, Anjou pigeon perfectly but lightly cooked in the tandoor, watermelon kanji sorbet and best of all, a crab ghee roast made with meat from the claws of a wild Norwegian crab. I met nearly all of the chefs in the Cinnamon Club kitchen because Vivek has a thing about not claiming all the glory and letting his team get the credit. They were skilled and passionate and it is clearly a happy kitchen on top of its game.

 

   Though 25 years seems like a very long time it was also 25 years ago that both Vineet Bhatia and Atul Kochhar won Michelin stars for their restaurants. Vivek is part of the next generation of Indian chefs in the UK though, like Vineet and Atul, he also came to London from the Oberoi group. (He was part of the team that opened Raj Vilas.)

 

   Vineet has now gone global which includes going home to the Oberois (three of the restaurants in his global collection are with the Oberoi group) but Atul is still a hugely significant feature on the British scene. He has many restaurants in the UK but is no longer associated with Banaras the restaurant that sealed his reputation. Atul was originally a founding partner in the venture, then fell out with his other partner and exited among ill feeling and a sense of betrayal.

 

"Jamavar gets an international Mayfair crowd of high rolling expats and visitors along with every famous Indian cricketer and movie star who comes to London."

   Banaras then lost the Michelin star Atul had earned for it and more recently there has been terrible publicity after its primary owner was convicted of trying to spike a woman’s drink at a London club and sent to prison.

 

   Ironically the food has rarely been better than it is now. The current chef is Sameer Taneja who has worked or staged at some of the UK’s best restaurants with such chefs as Heston Blumenthal, Pierre Koffman and Alain Roux. But he says he learned how to cook Indian food from Atul with whom he has worked at two restaurants. So it’s only fitting that Taneja won back the Michelin star that Banaras had earned when Atul was cooking.

 

   I went for lunch and could tell at once that the chef was classically trained from the excellence of his sauces and gravies. A foie gras momo swam in a gravy that Joel Robuchon would have been proud of (had Robuchon better understood Asian spices). A black truffle shorba combined delicacy and power. Scallops Malabar (though there are actually no wild scallops in Malabar: they are a cold water fish) worked because the gravy was so good that Taneja could have cooked kaddu in it and still made it taste delicious.

 

   I don’t know what will happen to Banaras given its owner’s problems but Taneja is the best thing to have happened to the restaurant since Atul left. I was gobsmacked by the quality of his cooking.

 

   Asma Khan and I worked together in Kolkata in the days when she was a journalist and I am not just thrilled by her unexpected gastronomic stardom but very pleased that her reference point is a vanishing Kolkata.

 

   Asma’s Kolkata is the cosmopolitan city where, at least at the level of the middle class, neither religion nor caste mattered. She has captured the spirit of the city on TV (the Asma episode of Chef’s Table has won awards), in books and most famously in her food.

 

   I went to her new restaurant in Covent Garden the day after it opened. It’s still called Darjeeling Express but it has a new location and a new menu. The food is as good as ever. There are keema toasties along with vegetarian versions made with chilli and cheese. The Bihari Fulkis are lighter than clouds. The pan fried momos remind us that the restaurant is called Darjeeling Express. The layered Channa chaat is straight from the street. Her famous puchkas come with a slight twist in the paani. A dish of Tangra style prawns looks simple till you bite into a prawn and the chilli and garlic flavours emerge.

 

   And finally for my last big dinner of the trip I went, as I nearly always do, to Jamavar. I have known the chef Surender Mohan since his days at the Leela in Mumbai and if you had told me back then that he would be the only Indian chef to run three restaurants in three countries and get a Michelin star for each restaurant I would have been sceptical.

 

   But Surender has surprised us all and the London Jamavar was jam-packed as usual on the night I went. Surender’s superb food went all the way from a paneer kulcha paired with Beluga caviar to home style Bhindi and a terrific Aloo Jeera.

 

   Jamavar gets an international Mayfair crowd of high rolling expats and visitors along with every famous Indian cricketer and movie star who comes to London. Banaras gets big-spending Brits. Asma gets the creatives, the trendies and people attracted by her fame and activism. Vivek gets the political and media establishment.

 

   They appeal to different core markets but are united by the pride they take in being Indian and in our food heritage.

 

   There are still more places to try including the newly opened London outpost of Tresind. Next time!