Christmas gifts are tricky things. It's why I felt very pleased with myself when I suggested our Christmas gifts to each other should be a joint meal somewhere nice - everyone gets what they want. I left them to choose, and they picked Veeraswamy, an Indian restaurant that boasts of being the oldest in London.
Nobody wanders in; you have to buzz for admission, and are let into a little corridor where the bored-looking receptionist takes the name then points you to the lift. Well, we are just off of Regent Street. It fits. I was shown to the table, where they took quite a while to ask me what drink I wanted then came and asked for dinner choices fairly promptly afterwards. I mightn't have objected to the wait for my drink if I wasn't several drinks behind my friends, but I was, and I was thirsty, and I'm used to the the question of beverage arising far sooner. As well as the question of water.
No matter. My mango lasse was quite nice, although not the finest I've had (yes I complained about being less full of alcohol but had a soft drink anyway). The room was perhaps half-empty at this point, maybe a little fuller, which together with decent spacing between tables meant the ambience was at a pleasing background hum, which was good as my friends had a lot of interrogation to do.
My starter was the crabcakes The chef had not stinted with the crabmeat and the coating was pleasingly crunchy, which is a fine start for the type, but after passing around the plates I found myself wishing I'd gone for the monkfish, which was just that bit better. The crab felt a little underseasoned, something exacerbated by stinting with the sauce. Or sauce-based decoration, as might be more accurate to say. Only the scallops came up with plenty of sauce, plump well-cooked morsels that benefitted from it immensely. It's not that I'm against food without sauce. But once some sauce has gone on, I expect enough for actual use.
Thankfully, I cannot whine about the mains and flavoured liquid designed for the enhancement of food. There was said liquid. There was lots of it. Our food swam around in it. I had plumped for the lamb chops, three of them for close to thirty pounds, which places a not inconsiderable amount of pressure on them to be pretty bloody good. They were. They were exactly the right shade of rosy pink, meat easing free of the bone with only a little pressure, covered with small fragments of nut to increase the crunch. My friends had the duck vindaloo and the malabher lobster curry, while the table shared a reasonable sized bowl of Naans (for over 10 pounds though), a small-ish bowl of lemon rice, a pineapple curry and a vegetable sidedish I didn't touch.
The duck vindaloo was very good, which is perhaps a worrying sign coming from me, who tends to deal badly with hot food. I had not even the faintest case of sniffles after eating it, which is not what is expected from a vindaloo. Still, there was spice enough to cut through the fat, particularly in company with the sweetened acid from the pineapple. I must hasten to add I'm really not complaining. All vindaloos should be like this. I just expect I would get lynched if all vindaloos were like this and it was revealed to be my fault. The lobster wasn't quite as show-stopping; buttery, meaty, perfectly cooked and richly seasoned, but just not quite as special. It too had came with a heat warning on the menu; again, I could not understand why.
For dessert we decided to run away to Gelupo's instead (increasingly my usual reaction to the end of any dinner near Soho), which led to a little internal friction as we tried to indicate we would like the bill and the waiting staff seemed more ambivalent about the process. We did make Gelupo's in time, but it left the slightest grumpiness in the mind as we left, when instead we should have all been very happy about filling ourselves with very good curry. Which reminds me again that I had the slightest grumpiness when walking in too.
Veeraswamy make a big thing about being upmarket. They're certainly not afraid to charge upmarket prices for not huge portions. Little blemishes in service stand out in such situations, particularly when you can look around and see that the room really is not all that full. Would that prevent me from going back there? Maybe. I'd be more likely to hold the overly restrained hand with the spice jar against them. Indian food, high end or no, should be bold and dizzying. Everything was good, but too little of it dizzying. Even I can take - nay, demand - more heat than that.
Perhaps Veeraswamy's long history has rendered them too used to English palates; outside, the world has moved on.
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