Green Chilli Cafe
1293 Argyle Street, Glasgow
0141 337 6378
Lunch/Dinner: £9.95-£25
Food rating 4/10
I HAD a choice: stay in, and cook from Sumayya Usmani’s fabulous new Pakistani cookbook, Summers Under The Tamarind Tree, or review a restaurant. Glasgow-based Usmani (who was interviewed in last week's Sunday Herald), has produced one of those volumes you should definitely not read in bed because it will wake you up and make you urgently hungry. She explains how to make slow-cooked curries, rich aromatic biryanis, barbecued meats, and much more, in the manner of Pakistani home cooks, that is, using recipes handed down the generations, and cooked by estimation (andaza). A few ingredients might test your sourcing – dried pomegranate powder (anadana), black salt (kalanamak), kewra (screwpine water – but in our cities at least we are fortunate in having shops that stock these authentic essentials.
The clincher, however, was the news that Glasgow’s Green Chilli Cafe had picked up the Chef of the Year in the Scottish Curry Awards. The book could wait, I thought. Let’s see why this restaurant has come out tops while it’s still flushed with success.
Having eaten there, I’m none the wiser. Even allowing for the fact that culinary competitions are often little more than marketing exercises for restaurateurs, if the Green Chilli Cafe represents the acme of cooking from the sub-continent, this whole sector is in a very bad way. This is the second really poor “Indian” meal I have had this year, one that was not convincingly better than the most basic, formulaic supermarket ready meal, and far inferior to anything a competent cook, following a good recipe, and using the right ingredients, could knock up at home. If this really is the best our curry restaurants can offer, then save your money and eat at home.
It has to be said that from the outside, the Green Chilli Cafe doesn’t look appealing. Half the window is given over to tacky plastic adverts for bargain tapas deals. Inside, that’s upstairs where you eat, drab brown fitted carpet and black leather tub chairs combine to depress the spirits. Everyone eating there when we visited seemed to be taking advantage of special offers, or Groupon deals. Perhaps these blunt the critical faculties. Or maybe we’re so accustomed to “Indian” food being a travesty of the real thing that we simply don’t know any better.
We had one reasonable dish, Jodphuri samosas with turmeric mashed potatoes, encased in crumbly pastry with a pleasing savoury flavour reminiscent of chickpea flour, spiked with aromatic seeds; Ajwain, I think. They came with a sledgehammer of a minty green sauce that slaughtered every other flavour on the table, but then the aloo bondi (described as cottage cheese and mashed potato balls) and the watery, insipid, disintegrating “Lahori fish” in batter, were both so chilli-hot, but otherwise bland and greasy, that the mint stuff made them more palatable.
Thereafter, our table was a repetition of dishes where everything was in a thick red sauce that looked and tasted universal, as though it shared the same ancestry, give or take a few tweaks. Homemade paneer makhni was red, sweet, a little creamy, minus the almond flakes advertised. Firm cubes of lamb tasted as though they had been plonked in the one-size-fits-all red sauce at the last minute, not like melting meat cooked in the fragrant gravy of a true “rogan josh”. “Goan” fish curry teamed up the same collapsing, anodyne fish with more of the thick red stuff, and had not the slightest savour of the promised coconut milk or curry leaves. Most of these dishes were listed on the menu as “New” and picked out in red type as though they were especially exciting. I tried to order the lemon rice, which sounded interesting with its “curry leaves, mustard, split Bengal gram, and pure vegetable ghee” but it was no longer on the menu. “Do you have anything else with curry leaves in it?” I asked. No, came the reply, which struck me as symbolic of a restaurant that can’t be bothered to be authentic.
Where is the young restaurateur prepared to call time on this lamentable performance, and give us a truly representative flavour of the amazing Indian subcontinent? He, or she, would surely prosper. A step change in this increasingly dismal category is well overdue.
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