Review of the Dulwich Tandoori - June 2010

Where: Dulwich Tandoori, East Dulwich
With whom: The Vole
How much?: £25 for a shared main, four sides / starters and a couple of beers (the obligatory After Eight was complimentary)

East Dulwich's answer to New York's Restaurant Row has a huge amount to offer the marketing consultants, media workers and bankers who throng its pavements daily and nightly. There are some good, if pricey, restaurants and gastropubs (yes the Palmerston, I'm looking at you), an excellent chippy in the Sea Cow and Green and Blue - one of the best neighbourhood winestores I've ever found. As well as those treats, it's home to a number of twee boutiques, a couple of delis and a very good local butcher. All in, an asset to the area. 

For some reason, it's also got a fair number of competing curry houses. After so-so experiences at several of these, I'd all but given up on them, putting the quality down to a lack of authenticity and a surfeit of generically spiced, pre-prepared, fast food served for a predominantly Anglo-Saxon palate. I used to live just off Tooting's curry mile, and so the loss has hit me hard.

I was therefore somewhat dubious as we entered the Dulwich Tandoori, one of the only we haven't tried yet. As it goes, I was pleasantly surprised. It's a real throwback to the 80's mind you, I felt like my father. Dusky red 'ethnic' wallpaper (verging on flock), a Bollywood-lite covers soundtrack of contemporary pop hits, paisley carpets and a small white jug of carnations on every table took us both back. The irritatingly sexist man arguing with his partner on the next table added to that Ashes to Ashes authenticity, though was perhaps less welcome.
  
We had a couple of poppadoms and skipped straight to a combined main course. the menu offers a few surprises. While they have every dish you'd expect from a local curry house, there are a few Bengali specialities that warrant a further look; Shatkora Chicken, named after the sour aromatic citrus fruit of the same name and a fish dish called Rup-Chanda made with the pomfret, a fish I'd certainly never heard of. They also, rarely, had several duck dishes on the menu. 
The chicken Dhansak, a traditionally Gujarati dish, was excellent. Succulent and perfectly cooked chicken served in a spice hot lentil mixture, flavoured with cumin, garlic and chilli. A fresh (if not especially authentic) mushroom pilau and a pleasingly flavoured Aloo Gobi complemented the generously portioned dish, easily enough for the two of us. It was all light, relatively oil free (with the possible exception of the Aloo Gobi) and obviously fresh. Microwave hot towels came on completion, and the modest bill was presented with a brace of After Eights. I'm sure, if we'd had room to contemplate looking, there would have been various frozen ices, served in fruit shells to finish.


I'll be back, the friendly service and interesting menu options will prove too tempting to avoid. It's no Benares certainly, but it's nice to find a good local curry house finally. Seeing what they are capable of with shackled with a menu stuffed with obvious staples I'm also tempted to ask the kitchen to prepare me one of the dishes that they'd prefer to be eating.

Eating the World Cup - England v Germany 27 June

Where (in South Africa): England v Germany, Bloemfontein, Sun June 27. This article is part of my Eating the World Cup series, to start at the beginning, have a look here

Where (in London): Only one option really,we went to Zeitgeist in Vauxhall. 

With who: Teacher Boy and a horde of football fans (some of who I actually knew) though I've been there before with a more sedate crowd
How much: Mains from £7 to £9 each

We've got an awful lot in common with the Germans. An obsession with beer, a football team less than the sum of its parts, cliched tabloid antipathy towards the French and a near religious relationship with pork. 

It's fitting therefore that they have elevated the humble sausage to the status of national dish. It doesn't have much competition to be fair, and served properly it can be a thing of beauty. In towns and cities across Germany you're never far from an Imbiss kiosk, a semi permanent food stall selling hungry folk a range sandwiches, chips, drinks (including beer, always a shocker to the Brit) and the omnipresent wurst. Grilled or boiled (Frankfurters mainly), damn tasty either way, they'll have a couple of alternatives with the drinkers favourite, the Bockwurst (cut with chives and parsley), found on most grills. You'll also spy the pale casing of the solid pork tubes of bratwurst and the juicy creaminess of the weisswurst (particularly in Munich) on many menus. My particular favourite however was always the currywurst - a concoction so iconic that the Berliners have opened a museum to it.

Kurz and Lang is a fair to middling takeaway counter in Farringdon. Styling somewhere between the traditional German sausage booth and a British butchers, it serves sausage in several styles and to go with them, the salty, golden potato cubes known as Bratkartoffeln. It's difficult to get such a simple joy wrong, and they thankfully don't. A recent visit served up a perfect currywurst, steamed, sliced and served under a thick blanket of 'curry' sauce, in reality a heavy mix of tomato ketchup and curry powder.

I've been to Zeitgeist before with the Vole. It seems slightly incongruous, a chocolate dark inside hidden away down Black Prince Road in Vauxhall within a barely rebranded frontage bearing the Jolly Gardener brand. We walked past it twice before realising where it was. Described as London's first German gastropub (a fairly safe claim) they offer 40 odd different beers. Some excellent choices, if a little pricy. DAB, a light and crisp easy drinker from Dortmund is a semi regular treat when bought from Oddbins, here it's over £4 a pint. They offer a range of wurst (including the ubiquitous currywurst) alongside a selection of schnitzels, a more Austrian treat, but one known across both countries. On previous visits I've sampled these, and can particularly recommend the Schnitzel Kolsche Art, the traditional pan fried pork escalope coated in breadcrumbs, served in this instance with a black pudding and apple sauce mix. It isn't gourmet, but does as its makers intended and serves up a hearty filler to put a cap on the foamy lager you've just sculled.