Ben W.
Yelp
Listen,
Two great things combined doesn't always work.
Joggers and leggings both work. Jeggings? Something's been lost in the amalgamation.
Smashing a good old English chop house together with a tandoor oven does feel like a no brainer though. Large pieces of meat on bone, slathered in Indian spices, burnished in a 500 degree tandoor oven. Is a review even necessary?
Annoying bits first. QR codes for menus are nonsense. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. We come to escape the thronging crowds of Covent Garden, the boss, the hunger pangs and most of all the fickle mistress that is technology. Yet here we are fiddling on our phones just to find out what's on offer. Scroll down for mains. Swipe right on anything paneer. Check your bitcoin to see if you can pay the bill. No. It's rubbish. Restaurants, stop it. We prefer to gaze lovingly at a piece of paper so we can map out our meal in a more tangible way. Call it a life pleasure. Don't destroy that with the black and white square of death.
After much scrolling and squinting we deduce the menu is fairly small. A few meats and fish from the tandoor. Four sides and a selection of naan, that's the gist of it. Something of a relief if choice fires a bright beam of light to your bunny eyes. I crave simple almost as much as I crave curry so we're in a good place here.
We order the lamb chops and tandoori chicken from the tandoor along with some black dal and a tomato, cucumber and onion kachumber. My reflex 'rice for the table' is swiftly rebuked by our helpful, knowledgable server. 'This is North Indian cuisine' we learn. I like that he was steadfast about their preference for naan, of which there were a few to sample.
But first some nibbles. An impressive looking stack of onion rings that weren't impressive in any other way. Soggy batter and the onion still raw inside. The smoked aubergine raita was nice though, and my index finger an adequate carriage.. Cauliflower bites were more successful. The subtlety of the cauliflower brought out with sensitive spicing, they were at once crispy and soft, the raison d'être of a croquette.
The rest arrives soon after and is a pleasing array. Tandoori chicken comes with the breast separated from the thigh and leg. I wonder if they cooked it this way too because both pieces managed to retain some of their juice. Skillz to the operator of that piece of kitchen equipment. 500 degrees can do bad things to a chicken breast but this one was plump and pleasing. Spicing wasn't too dissimilar to many other tandoori chickens I've eaten and that's a compliment. That there is a universal flavour to this dish gives hope that the collective unconscious can indeed make the world a better place. Jung would be delighted.
Lamb chop spices leaned more towards the pepper and clove end of the scale and were a pleasing contrast. The tandoor is a lot kinder to lamb. Outsides are allowed to be burned. Insides actually benefit from a lack of prolonged hear. Something the Chop House exploits well.
Black dal came as expected. Plenty of it. Nice and creamy. Perhaps not as sugary as the daddy at Dishoom. Onion and tomato Kambuchar did its job of lying to the brain that this was indeed the right amount of green to be putting in the body.
Breads worked well. Bone marrow naan was a plain naan spread with a good bone marrow sauce. Never seen that. Would order it again. The naan were thin and not indelicate. The thinness made it feel like these were to be enjoyed in their own right rather than just to fill any last remaining pockets of air in the stomach.
My companion in this latest culinary adventure came all the way from Portland. An old friend lost to the brain drain. I wanted to remind her what she was missing in good old Blighty and all I could think was 'curry'. The marriage of the old English chop house provided a relaxed, informal, sturdy setting in which to gabble, gossip and grab at food.
In truth, food played second fiddle. We nattered away not giving ourselves much time to do any actual ingesting. The request for a doggy bag was granted with pleasure and the staff were ever so patient given it took us an hour to order. We were blathering so much I forgot to take any pics of the mains and we didn't really dent them either. Suffice to say what was left I merrily consumed at dinner time in font of the telly watching celebs eat wholly different meats that hadn't gone near a tandoor without screaming "get me out of here!"
The Tandoor Chop House does what it says on the tiffin. Meat and spice in an English Indian canteen. Simple. Effective. A good marriage. Like a spork. Prices are not your normal curry house prices, perhaps as a consequence of being slap bang in the middle of the world's capital. Nonetheless, in this age of divorce, a successful marriage of ideas which I hope lasts until my Portland pal pops by again.