London's best review, food and drink news
By Guy Dimond
Everyone's at it: Bollywood megastar Asha Bhosle's got her own international chain of restaurants; Shilpa Shetty's mouthed her intentions to open a chain of Shilpa Shetty's Dining Rooms across the UK; and any TV chef who's blown the dust off a spice rack now claims an interest in Indian food. So where does that leave the real experts, the proper Indian chefs who really know their masalas? Ready for expansion, that's where.
The Panjabi sisters - owners of the smart fine-dining Indian restaurants Chutney Mary, Amaya, and Veeraswamy - were the first to exploit the gap for high-quality Indian fast food in stylish, modern settings. The result was Masala Zone, now with six branches and counting. Tamarind restaurant followed suit with Imli in Soho, serving good meals for a third of the price you'll pay for Alfred Prasad's cooking in the Mayfair original.
Urban Turban is the latest spin-off from a 'name' Indian chef and restaurant, in this case Vineet Bhatia, and his Chelsea restaurant called Rasoi ('kitchen'). When he cooked at the Star of India 15 years ago, it was the best Indian food in Chelsea; he was an innovator back then, with chocolate samosas and tandoor-cooked salmon. He went on to a stint at Zaika, before setting up Rasoi in 2004. At his new Urban Turban, chef Bhatia has ditched the fancier stuff, and made a return to his roots. And the cooking's all the better for it, simplified and back to what makes Indian food so brilliant: the clever melding of flavours. Bhalla chat is a Mumbai snack-bar dish of lentil-based dumplings cloaked in a sweet yoghurt sauce, the sweetness offset by the tartness of tamarind. Another winner was the masala crab and sweetcorn cake, though we found the accompanying spicy ketchup overpowering.
I remembered Bhatia doing a proper version of biriani and here it was, the sticky basmati rice layered with lamb chunks and rich layers of spice flavours, the rice moist and strongly flavoured with the spice-rich stock it was cooked in. It's presented in a copper bowl with a spiced pastry lid, with the traditional accompaniment of a simple cucumber and Greek yoghurt raita: you don't need accompaniments. Baingan bharta is another classic. The aubergine should be gently scented with smoke, and meltingly soft. This dish was proper and correct but with the unusual addition of peas. I rang Bhatia to ask him why. 'It's the way my mother used to make it,' came the reply. Born in Bombay and trained in Delhi, Bhatia's picked up diverse influences which he is passing on to chef Satish Shenoy, who will be head chef at Urban Turban once Bhatia's got the brigade trained up.
Urban Turban's room is dark with a huge bar in the centre, low lighting, and Nitin Sawhney soundtracking our visit, which says 'trendy lounge bar'. but the real action is in the kitchen, and on the plate.
Time Out London Issue 1953: January 23-29 2008
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Been to this cool eatery already 3 times and the food is absolutely amazing, especially the tapas selections. The cocktails they do are excellent as well
I’m always a bit stressed out by sub-continental food in London, not because of it’s exotic nature but because it is on the whole expensive and poorly made. Most restaurants rely on local Londoners who have never eaten outside of the capital and tourists who will never come back regardless of the food and service they are put in front of them.
So with some trepidation I agreed to go for dinner at the new place in town, Urban Turban, but hey I might be wrong, Growing up in Sparkhill Birmingham does not necessarily make me an expert in Indian cuisine (it does by the way, I’m just being humble).
We are sat directly by the door and the waiters station, which is a bit of a downer but they where completely full, but having booked a week previously you would of thought may be a warmer spot would have been available, but we’ll let that go.
The wine arrived after the starters and was asked for 3 times. The starters were nice not great and ranged from good value prawn skewers to micro-samosas which effectively cost £2 each, they where too small to even taste if they where any good.
In the mean time the water hand not turned up and after 4 different waiters where asked. But the mains, they turned up seconds after the starters, Mcdonnalds have slower service, but then again when the mains consist essentially of slow cooked stew spooned into small bowls it’s pretty easy to serve up.
And still more people arrived, I’m afraid to say most looked like they had more money than sense, a woman on the next table has often been in the evening standard, I believe her father was once talented. She of course got great service from the head waitress, but still the chaos around us continued and I began to deeply resent the money this was costing me.
In the end I refused to pay service, I wanted to complain, I wanted to explain that it was not directly any of the smiling waiters fault, there was no organisation and there where to many people. The dollar signs in the eyes of the management where blinding them from the fact that they did not care about there customers. If you are going to charge £12 for a small curry that honestly wasn’t much better than the type tinned by Marks and Spensers (A bargain at £2.30), then you should bally well get everything else right, they got everything else wrong and the food was not going to save them.
I didn’t get to explain, the Head waitress/manageress simple looked down her nose and asked if I needed my coat. Needed my coat? I didn’t know they took your coat! No-One offered!
Over rated; pretentious; fiddly; the street food bears no relationship to the real thing - unbalanced, wrong proportion of ingredients; curries indiffeent- taste of preground spices- lacking in flavour; tanddori items barely adequate - salmon marinade over sweet.
overpriced.