South Asian food – despite comprising complex, multilayered dishes that are painstakingly time-intensive to make – has garnered a reputation for being ‘cheap and cheerful’. No matter that it takes hours, nay days, to conjure up the depth of flavours diners often take for granted.
More recently, Melburnian restaurants like Enter via Laundry – no doubt building on the legacy of upmarket Indian restaurants like Tonka and Jessi Singh’s double threat of Horn Please and Daughter in Law – have done their bit to reconceptualise South Asian food in the mind of the Western diner: as a cuisine rich with the specificities of the subcontinent’s many distinct regions and something worth paying more than $20 for. Banish all thoughts of homogenous brown curries before you visit this raft of South Asian restaurants, which counts Ish among its legion.
Around since 2018 and occupying prime position on Gertrude Street, Ish contributes to this lineage with a menu that borrows from regions across South Asia – Kerala, Bombay, Bengal, Kashmir – and collates the old with the new. Expect to see lamb seekh kebab and samosa chaat sitting alongside the more fusion-flavoured roti duck tacos and cauliflower curried hummus, while the curry / mains are refreshingly devoid of your usual suspects. Yes, you’ll find butter chicken and it’s indeed one of Ish’s most popular dishes, but you’ll also encounter moilees, coconut-rich seafood stews from Kerala, and Kashmiri dum aloo, a yoghurt-based curry peppered with fried potato dumplings.
Known for its dinner service, Ish has recently started opening for brunch and lunch on the weekend. Exposed brick walls adorned with gold decorative plates is the fitting backdrop to a festive soundtrack that combines Bollywood bangers with more contemporary, soulful South Asian crooners like Arijit Singh and Anuv Jain. A bottle-lined bar dominates the front room, and there’s yet more tables upstairs.
Our waitstaff recommends we start with the vada pav and chicken tikka. The housemade vada pav features warm, exceedingly soft and fluffy dinner rolls (pav) stuffed with crunchy potato fritters with pillowy interiors (batata vada). The delightful textural contrast of this Bombay famous street food dish is only surpassed by the pleasant tartness of the tamarind chutney.
The chicken tikka, pleasantly charred on the outer edges from the tandoor and moist within, are a treat dragged across the yoghurt sauce they arrive in, sweetened by the presence of pomegranates.
The eggplant moilee’s creamy, coconutty richness belies its complexity – this is neither one-note nor one-dimensional, and its savouriness heightens significantly in the version that folds in prawns for an extra $6. Pair it with something heavier on masala in the form of the Bengali lamb curry (though we wouldn’t have minded a smidgen more heat) – melt-in-your-mouth bite-sized chunks of meat are interspersed with pleasantly fatty bits.
Coeliacs rejoice: Ish has gluten-free naan and although there’s only the option of having it plain instead of studded with black garlic (which Ish offers the unbridled digestive systems of wheat eaters), it’s better than most. Crafted from besan (chickpea flour), it closely resembles France’s chickpea flatbread socca. Rice lovers have the option of aged basmati tinged yellow from turmeric.
Summer drink specials range from an Indian espresso martini to a masala margarita, while teetotallers will be spoilt for choice – the mint cooler is a refreshing, alcohol-free take on a classic sour, while the crushed strawberries at the bottom of the berry soda makes for a wonderful explosion of sweetness towards the end. Real ones will love the filter coffee – a perfectly proportioned interplay of coffee, cow’s milk and sugar.
Prices at Ish are steeper than what people are used to paying for Indian, but if a sublime curry costs the same as an exquisite bowl of handmade pasta, perhaps the labour that goes into the former will finally be appreciated for the sheer effort and mastery that it entails.
Time Out Melbourne never writes starred reviews from hosted experiences – Time Out covers restaurant and bar bills for reviews so that readers can trust our critique.
