Dishoom Redux - Mar 2013

Ah Dishoom... The place I want so hard to love. Buzzy, relatively inexpensive and quirky, geezer-ish Sub-Continental street style food in a pukka Indian cafe, slap bang in the middle of Covent Garden. What's not to love?

They've certainly garnered support over the past year, not to mention another permanent location, this one next to Shoreditch House, threateningly close to the street flyer Kessel Run of Brick Lane.

With its amiably geezerish descriptors, the menu feels like it could been written by a Chowpatty Jamie Oliver, the spiritual brother of their next door neighbour. And like their next door neighbour, it feels like it's ripe for rollout. The all day 'cafe-vibe' schtick a shoe-in for shopping centre supremacy.

The service is shopping centre suitable too. Fast, well trained and entirely impersonal, operating on efficient pre-scripted rails from the moment you're sat down.

The food is pretty good, if not entirely quite there. The 'Ruby Murray' is good, and obviously well cooked with decent quality chicken but it's a little too 'mellow' for me. Keema Pau, a bland minced lamb served with English muffins has little to say for itself sadly. The house black dhal was admittedly lovely, the one dish I'd come back for, braised into a sauce rich and deep enough to feel meat infused, it had flavour to spare. The squid was over fried and the lamb chops a pale grey copy of those at Lahore or Tayyabs. It's all been done worse than this at a thousand curry places around the capital, but it's being done a whole load better at a critically acclaimed handful. On my evidence Dishoom isn't close to that Premier league.

There are just too many really decent Indian, Pakistani and Bengali restaurants I'd go to for a pre-planned curry trip and too many other restaurants in Covent Garden that get my attention for a walk up. Both of which are a slight shame, as it's really not that bad.

  PR photo from restaurant website

Baozi Inn - Stay out! Mar 2013

Offering a somewhat confused meander through North and West China (via Sichuan), the Baozi Inn has quietly squatted on its Chinatown corner for years. It's a bit down at heel inside, but no more than many of the other places that make up the alleys and nooks of Chinatown.

The baozi, ubiquitous across large parts of (particularly Northern) China where it is the equivalent of a sandwich, is a steamed doughy pocket, an oversized dumpling, stuffed with pork, mushrooms or whatever else is close to hand. It's hot, steamy meatiness is most of what I've ever wanted in a snack but for some reason it has never quite hit the spot. Unlike the steamed char sui buns you get on a weekend dim sum-athon, the dough is often too thick and dense for me, and the filling too often a molten hot, fatty meat patty swimming in it's own grease. As I say, it should do the trick...

Other than the leaden baozi which I've had a few times before from here and the stall across the road (each time vowing not to do it again), there's an array of other dishes on the menu. Many are Northern Chinese specialities but there's a scattering from the South West and elsewhere in the vast country. On deeper inspection sadly, none of what I tried recently was good.

Boiled beef fried in rice meal has the intriguing texture of slow cooked jerky coated in soft rice meal, like a rubbery overcooked fish finger swimming in astringent fuel cell orange oil. As unpleasant as it sounds, though they tried to inflict more digestive damage by banging it in a microwave before bringing it out. Beijing style dumplings with dark soy and vinegar were better, though the dumpling skin was much thicker than was entirely pleasant and at £7.50 a portion, three times the price of those at Silk Road.

Fridge cold spinach with beans, lemon and ginger dressing finished an under-ambitious, barely edible trio that left me wishing i'd had a sandwich instead. Not a baozi, I'd have taken a budget service station offering over that little lot, and wouldn't have come close to the £20 I had to shell out.