Lazeez

On November 13, 2015February 18, 2018 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Lazeez closed in February 2018, and will be replaced by a new restaurant, apparently called Afghan. I’ve left this review up for posterity.

Pardon the pun, but eating out is often about your gut reaction, and some of the oddest meals I’ve had while reviewing have been ones where my head tells me one thing and my gut tells me another.

Usually, that happens in fancy, precise, pristine places: my head admires the artful arrangement of ingredients on the plate and the provenance (which always, however well-intentioned, has a whiff of name-dropping about it) on the menu, but my gut tells me this is food for people who love to tell people where they’ve eaten, rather than food for people who love to eat. Lazeez, a newish Pakistani restaurant down the Wokingham Road, is that unusual beast, the same phenomenon in reverse. I can see lots of reasons why I would dislike my meal there, so how come I didn’t?

I went partly because despite being three months old it had nearly no digital footprint whatsoever – no reviews, nothing on TripAdvisor, although I’ve been told by one reader that it was easily as good as House Of Flavours. But also, I was also intrigued by the notion of a Pakistani restaurant, as I don’t think Reading has any others which specifically identify themselves as such. In a rare piece of research not involving Wikipedia, I even asked a colleague at work, currently planning his wedding in Islamabad, what Pakistani food is like. “Pretty much the same as Indian”, he said.

It’s an interesting place to open a restaurant, two doors down from Miah’s Garden Of Gulab, which either demonstrates huge confidence or a fundamental lack of market research (even now, having eaten there, I can’t decide which it is). But it’s quite a nice room, a big square with booths and banquettes round the edge and tables in the middle. One interior wall has rather tasteful brick-effect tiles, another has very attractive lattice-work with lighting panels behind it which, disconcertingly, change colour on a regular basis. I can imagine on another, busier, night it could all be a bit much, but on a quiet weekday night (and it was quiet – we were the only table there) I rather liked it while at the same time knowing I shouldn’t. It was a disconnected feeling I had to get used to.

Certainly the menu was compact by the standards of Indian restaurants I’ve been to: no poppadoms on offer, a smallish selection of starters, a similarly manageable range of mains (grilled, chicken, lamb or vegetarian) and a handful of specials, including lamb trotters – maybe another time, eh? – and the only seafood main on the entire menu. Two other things jumped out from the menu. One is that the restaurant doesn’t have an alcohol licence, which I suppose will rule it out for some people but didn’t bother me. The other, more significantly, is how inexpensive everything is: most mains hover around the six pound mark, the costliest starter is four pounds.

So, cheap and nasty or cheap and cheerful? The starters were the first evidence. Shami kebab, which I ordered as a change from the usual sheekh kebab, sounded interesting – a mixture of finely minced lamb and ground dal. I liked it more in theory than in practice – two round pucks which had a vague flavour of lamb but none of the texture that goes with it, and a heat which went from “meh” to “my word” by the end of the dish. If anything they were more like spicy rissoles, which sounds more like a euphemism for a medical complaint than something you’d clamour to pick off a menu.

Chicken tikka was a more traditional choice and was better, if not perfect. I was a bit surprised by how neatly cylindrical it all was, cut into equal sized chunks by someone very good at cutting things into small chunks (a trick which was to be repeated with the main courses). It was quite tasty, if a little bit lacking in the tenderness of the best examples I’ve had in Reading. I couldn’t decide how I felt about it, torn between “this is only four pounds!” and “well, it’s only four pounds”. Both starters came with a perfectly decent selection of perfectly decent raita, mango chutney and something a bit like a hot chilli mint sauce.

No sooner had the starters left than the mains, two sizzling karahi dishes on little wooden stands, were whisked to the table. This is one of my pet hates in any restaurant, and more than anything it made me wonder if Lazeez quite got how restaurants are meant to work. I understand it must be dull standing around in a kitchen when the room out front only has two customers in it, but that’s no excuse to curtail what’s meant to be a pleasant, leisurely evening for those two customers. Still, I could hardly send them away and again, I found myself thinking that given the price perhaps I was the one with the wrong expectations.

Karahi chicken was pleasant. Chunks of chicken and, I think, some little shreds of chicken were in there and I spotted a few little batons of ginger on top. The sauce was red, a little spiced but pretty unremarkable. The whole thing was a little well-mannered for me, as if someone had fitted a normal dish with a silencer. It was also ever so slightly on the small side and the pieces of chicken were also a tad diddy, especially if you’re used to the massive pieces in many Indian restaurants where you have to cut them in half or risk somebody having to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. Still, at the risk of repeating myself, it was six quid.

The star of the night was the bhindi gosht – lamb curry with okra. The okra was what made it – sticky rather than slimy, still firm and really quite delicious with the gently spiced sauce and the sweet shreds of onion. This managed to be subtle rather than bland, in contrast to the karahi chicken which got that balance wrong. But again the pieces of lamb, though tender and soft, were small and few and far between. Both dishes, the karahi chicken and the bhindi gosht, were shiny with oil to the extent where I had slight misgivings.

Rice was rice, no surprises there. There wasn’t enough sauce to need it all. More of a clanger was the aloo paratha. I love paratha; I know it’s unhealthy but there’s something about those buttery layers of bread that makes me come over all unnecessary, and the idea of such a thing stuffed with potato really appealed to me. Unfortunately, what came out was a stodgy, oily thing, the shape of a frisbee, full of cubes of potato and peas as you’d find in the middle of a samosa. Arg and Lydia from The Only Way Is Essex are switching on the Broad Street Mall lights this weekend, but even those two combined are not quite as dense as that paratha was. We abandoned half.

On a more positive note, possibly due to the lack of an alcohol licence, Lazeez doesn’t just do glasses of mango lassi. Oh no. They do a jug of the stuff. For seven pounds. It’s not every day you can go into a restaurant and say “and I’ll have a carafe of the mango lassi” and they deserve some credit for that alone (it was very nice too, to the extent where I wish I’d skipped the shami kebab and had a jug to myself). I should also say that service was lovely, if a tad eccentric. Obviously there are no real excuses for a meal which took – no word of a lie – forty minutes from start to finish, but the waiter was very friendly and genuinely interested in us, what we thought of the food and the Indian restaurants around town. Dinner for two came to thirty-two pounds, not including tip. We didn’t have dessert, mainly because my stomach felt more oiled up than a Chippendale.

Sometimes the act of writing a review is the final thing that crystallises my view of a restaurant. You’d think that would happen here, and yet despite all that’s gone before I feel a certain warmth towards Lazeez. Yes, there were lots of mistakes – the timing, the execution of some of the dishes, their oiliness – and yet it feels like Lazeez is a chrysalis from which a good restaurant might at some point emerge. I even wondered whether I was really in the target market for Lazeez or whether it’s aimed towards the Pakistani community in Reading (it wouldn’t necessarily surprise me; on my way home I wandered into Home Taste across the road and asked if I could look at a menu. “Not unless you’re learning Chinese” grinned the man behind the counter).

Crucially, what might keep Lazeez going is that it fills a gap in the market; it’s cheaper than most of its competitors and it’s an easier, more casual place to grab dinner (especially before going out drinking, or if you’re with teetotallers) than Miah’s. Put it this way, given a choice between the two I’d still go to Lazeez nine times out of ten, even though ten times out of ten my head would probably tell me that Miah’s is a “better restaurant”. But that’s how it goes: the gut wants what the gut wants, after all.

Lazeez – 6.7
146a Wokingham Road, RG6 1JL
0118 9668802

http://www.lazeezrestaurant.co.uk/

Miah’s Garden Of Gulab

On July 17, 2015November 25, 2020 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

N.B. After losing its alcohol licence because it hired illegal workers, and after failing to transfer the licence from father to son, Miah’s Garden Of Gulab closed in 2020. A new restaurant called Gulab Indian Kitchen has opened on the same site. It is not clear whether there are any links between this and the previous restaurant. I’ve left this review up for posterity.

There’s been lots of change in the world of Reading restaurants recently. Wolf, offering “Italian street food” – if such a thing exists, and I have to say I’m skeptical – opened not long ago on Broad Street. Not far away, lunchtime sushi and noodle joint Itsu opens soon in the spot at the John Lewis end of Queen Victoria Street; even if you don’t like sushi it’s got to beat the crimes against the English language perpetrated by previous occupant “Fone Bitz”. A short stroll down Chain Street, Argentine chain CAU is now open for business in its innovative split level pitch next to the Holybrook. And if you stroll past CAU and into the Oracle, Manhattan Coffee Company is now trading on the top floor (an independent in the Oracle! I know! How did they pull that off?).

The thing I notice most often about new places is that they’re packed. Every time I go past CAU it’s rammed, often on both floors (it’s not the biggest of restaurants, and seems even smaller when it’s full of people). We like novelty value – we upgrade our phones every couple of years and, it seems, we enjoy upgrading our restaurants too. I like shiny new things as much as the next person, but something about this troubles me: what about all the tried and tested stalwarts? It’s a fine line between classic and dated – not moving with the times is one thing, but being left behind by the sheer rate of change is another.

For many years the mainstays of Reading’s Indian restaurant scene were Bina and Standard Tandoori in Caversham and the Garden Of Gulab on the Wokingham Road (and the much-missed Sardar Palace on Cemetery Junction – mind-boggling décor and bottles of Chateauneuf du Pape for fifteen quid: I loved it there). Annual reviews in the local paper, references to John Madejski hunkering down for dinner, the occasional award – their primacy was undisputed. But recently something else has changed: when GetReading published the shortlist for its inaugural curry awards earlier this year none of them was anywhere to be seen. In their place were the pretenders to the throne: River Spice, Bhoj, House Of Flavours.

House Of Flavours was the eventual winner and it’s hard to deny that it deserves its success; it’s a brilliantly run restaurant, the food’s immaculate and the location is perfect. But I couldn’t help thinking about the old guard. Surely they hadn’t gone bad overnight? I always complain about how people should use it or lose it (a sentiment as true of South Street Arts Centre, incidentally, as it is of I Love Paella) but what if I didn’t go to a place like Garden Of Gulab only to find one day that it wasn’t there any more? So my choice this week was made.

The interior conforms to the classic formula of many Indian restaurants: the bar at the front, with a small waiting area for people collecting takeaway, and the dining rooms beyond. There are three in total and all of them looked clean, presentable and a little dated, although the one at the front was reassuringly busy for a weekday night. It makes much of its awards and certificates, which are all displayed in the waiting area, and in fairness they win them on an annual basis: shortlisted for the British Curry Awards year after year and with a couple of TripAdvisor certificates too. I was determined to give the menu a chance to impress me by moving away from the standards and seeing what the kitchen had dreamed up to supplement them. There was plenty there: a full range of interesting-sounding combinations (some with pictures of the food, which wasn’t as heinous as it might sound) and a couple of very credible vegetarian options.

First though, the traditional poppadoms: light and warm, served with no less than six different dips. Miah’s seems proud of these, although they do charge you a quid for the privilege which feels slightly cheeky. Of them the mango chutney was quite thin and unremarkable, as was the raita. My favourites were the lime pickle – sharp, sour, almost salty – and a beautiful heap of grated coconut and carrot which was sweet and savoury all at once. Things had started well, although that extra quid lodged in the gullet somewhat.

I decided to try a mixture of the traditional and the unconventional for starters and Indian tandoor pool, broccoli and cauliflower grilled in the tandoor, sounded too good to miss. I love the way Indian cooking can bring vegetables like these to life and I was genuinely fascinated to see what turned up. The dish was meant to come with milk cake, pimentos, olives and ginger. Forgive my ignorance, but I have no idea whether it did or not and I’ve eaten the bloody thing. There were slices of what I assumed was paneer, and certainly tasted like paneer. Was that the milk cake? Based on my Googling, I don’t think so. There were also little wedges of what I was pretty certain were potato. Not mentioned anywhere on the menu, but I got a second opinion and my companion thought they were potato too.

I didn’t see any pimento, olive or ginger anywhere. The broccoli and cauliflower had no char or texture to indicate they’d been cooked in a tandoor, if anything they seemed steamed. The whole thing was in a lake of sweetened sauce and topped with a random slice of lemon. It felt like an ill-advised attempt at the Masterchef invention test, or a Bollywood remake of cauliflower cheese. It felt, to be honest, like a mistake.

My other starter was the mixed starter for one, and this is the point where things went awry. My dining companion won’t eat raw coriander; it’s fine cooked, but raw I’m told it tastes like Fairy Liquid (it’s genetic, apparently). So we clearly pointed that out when placing our orders. Now personally, I don’t think this is asking too much: the recipe didn’t need to be changed, the sauce didn’t need to be modified, just no leaves sprinkled on the top as it left the kitchen, thank you. But it seemed like perhaps it was: the dish came out sizzling away but as the scented steam cleared, before the plate even got to our table, it was obvious that the dish was festooned with coriander.

What to do? Well, we did what any self-respecting Brit would do – we apologised for the fact that they hadn’t done what we asked and sent it back. Two minutes later a new plate came out – except it wasn’t, it was the same plate, just with some of the leaves dusted off (or maybe they removed them with tweezers – however they did it, it was only a partial success). Feeling a mixture of embarrassed about our fussiness and determined not to give in, we sent it back again. When the waiter came back to the table I couldn’t tell whether this was a reunion or a new meeting, but the dish that was put in front of me was lukewarm and weirdly oily. There was almost no coriander, but by this point the lack of coriander wasn’t enough of a selling point on its own: it needed to be perfect and it just wasn’t.

The other starter had long been dispatched by this point so, having had enough, we told them we didn’t want the mixed starter any more and they took it off the bill. By this point my companion was on the borderline between exasperation and apoplexy and I was starting to realise that a mistake like this doesn’t just ruin a course: it can ruin an evening, too. The waiters seemed either uncomprehending or annoyed by our ingratitude – not sure I wanted to know which.

The saga has a bizarre postscript: they then brought the mixed starter again. My companion was geared up to explode when they ever so nicely apologised and told us it would be on the house. It was a small sheekh kebab, some chicken tikka and a whopping onion bhaji, dressed with the usual pointless bit of salad and one of those lemon squeezers like my mum had at the back of the kitchen drawer. Was it worth all that palaver? No, not really. The chicken tasted good but the texture was off-putting – unnaturally soft and smooth to the point of feeling (but not tasting or looking) undercooked. The kebab was pleasant but didn’t stand out in any way from those I’ve had at a dozen other Indian restaurants across town. I liked the onion bhaji – coarse and nicely spiced – but not enough to have waited three iterations for it. And although it was nice to get a freebie (makes a change), I’d rather they’d got it right first time, or at least fixed it properly first time.

The mains arrived shortly after my second starter was taken away (although in fairness they did ask if we wanted to wait). Lamb shank was probably the most successful dish of the evening but even this wasn’t without its faults. The good bit: it was a huge hefty shank – nobody’s going to go hungry ordering this – and the sauce was beautiful. Smoky, spicy, hot, earthy and dense, thickened with lentils, packed with cardamom pods and pepper it was everything I was looking for in a sauce. Scooped onto the naan or jumbled up with the rice it was truly delicious.

But the lamb needed ever so slightly longer – you could eat it, and there was lots of it, but that extra time would have added the final touch of softness, made it truly collapse to the point where it too could be mingled with that sauce. The nan bread, too, wasn’t faultless – too small, thick and dense where it needed to be thinner and airier. I barely ate half of it, and once I’d finished the whole thing I just wanted to click my fingers and be at home, in some pyjamas with an elasticated waist, lying in the recovery position and digesting the whole lot like a python.

My other dish was murgh jeera adrath, chicken breast in cumin, ginger and honey sauce. Again the chicken had that jarringly soft texture which made it a little unappetising, and it seemed exactly the same shape as the pieces in the starter. It was unsettlingly homogeneous, in fact, and once I realised this it rather put me off it. The sauce was interesting but, again, a bit sweet and slightly lacking in complexity: honey, cumin and ginger is an intriguing combination but it worked better on the page than on the plate. “It tastes like the kind of curry you’d order if you don’t particularly like curry”, said my companion, not without good reason. The peshwari naan ordered to accompany it, however, was heavenly. Rich and jammed full of sweet sticky coconut, I found it easy to chomp through a lot of this at the expense of the curry. I couldn’t understand the blood-red colour of it; I wondered if the head waiter’s firstborn had been sacrificed in order to appease the coriander gods.

We didn’t have many drinks – a reliable pint of Kingfisher, a mango lassi which felt a little too thin and straightforward to have been truly made fresh and a ginger ale (the last mainly because of its renowned ability to aid digestion) and the whole thing came to just over forty-six pounds, not including service. You’ve probably already got an idea of service from the rest of the review, but the incident over the starters was a turning point: before that they were off-hand and a bit remote, afterwards they were genuinely lovely and couldn’t do enough for us. My companion thought it was a tacit acceptance that they’d taken their eye off the ball. I think it’s because my companion can be pretty terrifying when crossed.

So, what have we learned? Personally, I’ve learned that if they’d brought out some starters without coriander this review would have been half the size and the meal would have been twice as enjoyable. Maybe the review would have been twice as enjoyable, too. I’ve also learned that when a restaurant fixes a problem slowly or badly it can be worse than when they don’t fix a problem at all. But I’m not sure what else I’ve learned about the Garden Of Gulab: I might not have seen them at their best, but the restaurant all those certificates praise in the waiting area didn’t feel like the restaurant I ate at that night. Maybe, after all that, the real difference between the young pretenders and the old-timers is the newcomers have the hunger and the drive to build up a customer base and keep it.

Miah’s Garden Of Gulab – 6.7
130-134 Wokingham Road, RG6 1JL
0118 9667979

http://www.miahs.co.uk/restaurants/garden_of_gulab/

Cafe Madras

On May 22, 2015January 19, 2018 By ediblereadingIn Reviews1 Comment

Cafe Madras was closed as of January 2018. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

One thing I’ve not yet acquired, despite writing this blog for nearly two years, is that unshakeable self-belief that many proper restaurant reviewers have. I really do envy them; it must be lovely to be so certain that you’re right about good food and bad food. I’m not even able to fake that, so every time someone visits a restaurant based on a good ER review and likes it, I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet. And when I don’t enjoy somewhere, I always wonder whether it’s just me, whether the off-day was mine rather than the kitchen’s. Eating at Café Madras this week reinforced all of those suspicions: I didn’t enjoy it, but it felt like I could find at least a few reasons why that might have been my fault.

For a start, I over-ordered – three starters and three mains between two seemed like a good idea on a ravenous school night, but by the end of the starters I could already feel a creeping, heavy fullness that left me uncertain about how much headway I would make into the main courses. Also, at least a few of the dishes were similar enough that you could argue that I’d just chosen badly – kush ka fried rice, a dry dish full of onions and spice and little shreds of what looked like lamb felt very similar to the lamb kotthu, another stainless steel bowl of broken up paratha, minced lamb, onions. Both dry (even with the accompanying bowl of yoghurt), both slightly heavy going.

When I left disappointed and walked down the hill into town, I felt uneasy that maybe I had let the restaurant down rather than vice versa. After all, the service had been lovely throughout – the man serving me was friendly and interested, suggested dishes from the specials menu and looked after us brilliantly. The room, although basic, was nice enough and had a steady stream of customers, some solo diners, some smaller groups of friends or couples, one large family. At least a few appeared to be repeat visitors.

The site itself, up at the top of Whitley Street, has a complex history. When it opened as Chennai Dosa in 2009 Reading had seen nothing like it. People queued round the block to get in for authentic, inexpensive South Indian food. Then Chennai Dosa moved into the centre and, for reasons I can’t entirely remember, the site rebranded as Café Madras in 2011. Last year it had the dubious honour of being one of Reading’s only restaurants with a zero star hygiene rating from the council – since then it has come under new ownership, turned that rating around and is clearly trying really hard to live up to its original promise.

So, there you go: I’ve outlined lots of reasons why I could pull my punches. And it would be really easy to do that, because nobody enjoys criticising an independent restaurant, especially one where the service is excellent. Especially one, for that matter, in an area like Katesgrove which is crying out for some – any – good neighbourhood restaurants. But it all comes down to the food, and the more I thought about it more I realised that there was something disappointing about nearly everything I ate that night.

So Gobi Manchurian, for example, wasn’t the delicate delight it can be (and is, at other restaurants in Reading) – the batter was thick and heavy, the florets of cauliflower underneath just a little too hard. The oily slick of sauce at the bottom of the bowl made me wonder just how much fat was sloshing around in my stomach. Similarly the special chicken tikka – recommended by the waiter – sizzled attractively and some of it was nice enough, but the inside of a couple of pieces, though certainly not raw, was firm and bouncy in a way that chicken tikka really should not be. Only the masala vada – circular lentil patties, like flattened bhajis – bucked the trend, being crispy, nicely spiced and beautiful with the thickened yoghurt on the side, speckled with nigella seeds. That was the only dish we finished all evening.

Even if I hadn’t been approaching full at high speed, I still think the main courses would have disappointed me. I could see that lamb kotthu might have been wonderful warming food if you’d grown up on it, an exotic cousin of the shepherd’s pie, sticky and rich. But it was just a tad too claggy and almost sweet, and the big chewy lumps of paratha felt like harder work than I associate with comfort food. Paneer masala, deliberately chosen as a meat-free main, had a lovely smoky sauce but, again, was a little too oily for me to feel like making significant inroads. We counted around half a dozen not very large cubes of paneer floating in it. By the end it had degenerated into a vegetarian fishing expedition bobbing for cheese, one about as successful as most fishing trips.

The best of the mains was the one I had lowest expectations of – the fried rice was packed with seeds and spices, onion and egg, small subtle strands of lamb (and a little shard of bone, as it happens). It was gorgeous and complex, with a heat that kept on growing and developing. But I didn’t really appreciate it at the time – only a couple of days later when I took my leftover rice to work (the waiter having kindly packed it up for me) and microwaved it in the kitchen did I realise just how good it was, mainly because of the envious remarks from my colleagues who were ploughing through their frigid, miserable supermarket sandwiches. But reheating my memories of the meal didn’t have the same happy consequences: it was still far more misses than hits, even if my aim could have been slightly better.

The meal – three starters, three mains and the grand total of four slightly too smooth, slightly synthetic-tasting mango lassis – came to thirty-four pounds, not including service. A cheap meal, and one that could have been even cheaper, but even at that price a curiously underwhelming one.

One of the big questions I ask myself when reviewing a restaurant – usually at this point in a review, as you may have noticed – is “would I go back?” If Cafe Madras wasn’t so far out of town, or if it was in my neighbourhood, I think I probably would. And I’d find the things on the menu that suited me better, I’d get to know the staff, I’d take their advice, and it could be a restaurant I’d learn to love. If you live in Katesgrove, you may have learned to love it already. But it isn’t any of those things, and the South Indian restaurant that is in the centre – Chennai Dosa – moved there from this spot, for very good reasons. So would I go back? The answer is the most frustrating one of all: nearly, but not quite. I don’t have the unshakeable self-belief to tell you not to go there. But I can’t recommend that you do.

Cafe Madras – 6.4
73-75 Whitley Street, RG2 0EG
0118 9758181

http://cafemadras.co.uk/

Chennai Dosa

On October 10, 2014October 14, 2021 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

Chennai Dosa closed in June 2018. I’ve left the review up for posterity.

Chennai Dosa has been on my list of places to review since the very beginning and it’s probably remiss that it’s taken me so long to get there. It seems to fall between countless stools in the Reading food scene; too big for lunch and too small for dinner, not expensive but not mega cheap, right in the centre but away from the main streets. Even so, it has carved out quite a niche by offering fast-ish food from south India, setting it apart from holy trinity of curry, rice and naan offered at Reading’s other – more Anglicised – Indian restaurants.

It would appear to be good at it, because visiting early on a week night I was pleased to see that it was busy; excellent news, because there are few things more uncomfortable than reviewing an empty restaurant (in fact, if anything, it was even busier when I left). The menu here is overwhelming for newcomers: nearly 150 dishes, a quite head-scratching amount. I was certain that I would have the dosa, as it would be churlish not to, but what else could I try to get a decent sample?

Starting with the “Gobi 65” turned out to be one of my better ideas. Small florets of broccoli (not the cauliflower advertised on the menu but I’ll overlook that on this occasion) marinated in spices and then fried were just gorgeous – light and spicy without being overly hot. They were the kind of fun vegetables that could almost persuade kids to eat their greens (and a lot more tasteful than their close relative, Eiffel 65 – an earworm I had for the rest of the evening thanks to Chennai Dosa).

The other starter of chicken varuval was equally successful, if quite substantial. Large pieces of chicken cooked with south Indian spices in a delicious, dry, deep red sauce, with peppers, onions and curry leaves. It had a depth of flavour – and a slow, building heat – that I would struggle to adequately describe but which would definitely made me order it again. The chicken, sometimes a bit dry in Indian restaurants, was beautifully soft and the sauce was richer than Donald Trump (and infinitely more palatable). Hearty food, this – so hearty than it could easily have passed itself off as a main course.

Speaking of the mains, they started to turn up before we’d finished off our starters, which I found irksome. I guess as a relatively informal dining experience Chennai Dosa takes the same approach as Wagamama in that your dishes arrive when they feel like it, but I wasn’t expecting that and it’s always been a bugbear of mine. Besides, why divide your menu into starters and mains if you’re going to bring them all at roughly the same time? That, coupled with the erratic service, meant that the mains arrived before one of the drinks – a pint of Kingfisher we had to ask for a total of four times. The irony: this must be the only Indian meal I’ve ever had in Reading where getting the waiter to bring beer to the table has proved difficult.

Of the mains, dal with paratha was pleasant verging on dull. The dal had curry leaves, small chunks of tomato and was speckled with nigella seeds and was tasty enough when scooped with a torn piece of buttery paratha but it lacked the richness and complexity of the chicken or the spice of the gobi. I guess I’m used to the intense, rich dal of places like House Of Flavours which is strong enough to stand as the main attraction, but this felt like a side dish pure and simple; my mistake, perhaps, rather than the kitchen’s.

The dosa, on the other hand, was delicious. What arrived at the table was a shiny stainless steel prison tray with a number of sauces, chutneys, sambar etc. on one side and a huge – and I mean huge – folded over crepe filled with curry on the other. The texture of the dosa was a thing of wonder – slightly crisp on the outside while being soft and pliable in the middle (a bit like the first pancake on Shrove Tuesday that the chef sneakily eats in the name of quality control). The filling was a huge helping of potato masala with an equally generous portion of spiced chicken on top. This is definitely the thing to order, I reckon, and everything about it was marvellous. The masala was a mixture of firm chunks of potato and gooey, comforting mash. The chicken was full of spices – cardamom, star anise and cinnamon all ended up on the side at the end – and again, the texture was exactly right. Add to that the part-crispy, part-spongy dosa to grab, scoop and dip and the range of sauces to mix things up with and you have something that’s part meal, part edible adventure playground. I loved it.

Despite feeling quite full I just cannot resist gulab jamun so dessert was inevitably on the cards. They’re a known quantity for me by now and Chennai Dosa’s were nice but unexceptional, delicious and unsurprising: warm, squidgy and with more syrup than, erm, Donald Trump (I really don’t know why he keeps cropping up. Sorry about that.) They were bettered though, by the honey and rose kulfi which was like a Mini Milk from heaven. If you can imagine a super creamy ice cream lollipop with subtle, grown-up honey and rose flavours then you’ll have a pretty good idea what this tasted like. At £2.25 I had half a mind to order another and eat it on the way home.

To drink we had a couple of disappointing mango lassis, a pint of Kingfisher – eventually – and a huge glass of red wine (unintentionally huge but I did drink it all) that came in a glass so chalky from the dishwasher that you could have written on a blackboard with it. Service was adequate but forgetful, though to be fair Chennai Dosa is as close to a canteen as it is a restaurant, with a snappy turnaround of diners and tables rarely occupied for more than 45 minutes at a time. The bill for three courses with drinks for two was thirty six pounds. I would say it was without tip but it seems there is no concept of tip here – the bill has to be paid in cash at the till and there’s no tip jar, let alone the idea of the “optional” service charge.

As so often, I was so keen to try everything Chennai Dosa had to offer that I’m pretty sure my experience wasn’t typical. I don’t think this is a three course starter, main, dessert kind of a place: it’s somewhere you can grab a quick tasty lunch or a quick tasty dinner and then be on your way. But for that it’s pretty close to unimprovable. The dosa in particular, at less than a fiver, is just perfect and made me think twice about spending close to that at countless other lunch places in town. The worst thing about eating here – apart for the interminable wait for drinks – was also the best incentive to come back: seeing all manner of different dishes arriving at other tables and wondering what they were. Next time I might pluck up the courage to go over and ask – right after I’ve finished some more of that Gobi 65. And got rid of that earworm, with mind bleach if necessary.

Chennai Dosa – 7.0
11-13 Kings Road, RG1 3AR
0118 9575858

http://www.chennaidosa.com/

Sapana Home

On September 19, 2014September 7, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews5 Comments

Go to Sapana Home, someone recommended on Twitter recently. Great dumplings, good curry and brilliant value. Well, I thought, how can you argue with that? In a single Tweet they’d conveyed easily as much information as you find in one of my reviews, so the least I could do was act on the tip-off.

Edible Reading

Tag: curry