If you want a curry, just go to your local ‘Tandoooori’, or the ‘Light of India’, which you can find on every single high street and most side streets, in the land. But if you do that, what do you really get? You get a wonderful meal (I love curry; if you don’t, best you read something else today), after strolling in, or booking if you like, it arrives quickly, you eat, you drink, you’re full to bursting and the bill comes for 30 quid. Including ‘service’ and drinks, for two. (Note: if your ’plus 1’ happens to be the boatman, make that 60 quid. Pig).

Who fucking needs that?

Because if you go to Dishoom, you are signing up to ‘an experience’ of the curry variety. And as we all know. Experiences don’t come cheap.

The boatman in fact left his boat for an evening, to face the tides and the waves and the… River stuff, alone, whilst he came all the way into town. From Kingston. Or Hampton. Somewhere ‘down there’, probably on the River. And we went to Dishoom in Covent Garden. I’ve been there before, but only for breakfast. Which is quite spectacular.

First thing to note: they don’t do ‘reservations’ and no-one ‘breezes in’. You see the queue from half way up St Martin’s Lane. Oh. I’m really not one of life’s queuey types. My impatience and horribly questioning nature (ask Mel how annoying I can be; she’ll be honest) mean I just can’t stand there. So I went to find ‘how long’. And the ‘queue gel’ came over. And we grilled her. They don’t do reservations because its so difficult… blah, blah, blah… no room for walk-ins… would be booked for months…
I just mentioned that EVERY OTHER FUCKING RESTAURANT IN THE WORLD MANAGES THAT JUST FINE, but subtley, and so she asked if we’d like to wait our allotted 35 minutes at the bar? Oh. Let me think… outside… in the rain… cold… or bar… warm, comfy, beer…

No-one else was at the bar. No idea why they didn’t offer it immediately. So we sat, we drank and enjoyed the atmosphere. Because the place is spectacular. It really is. Massive, on 2 floors, and just ‘buzzin’. Yet I couldn’t help notice that probably 35% of the tables were empty. And when we eventually took our table, about 40 minutes later, we sat at a table which had been empty that entire time. No-one else was sitting at the bar in all that time either. We were ‘special’.

The whole ‘queuing thing’ is to increase desirability. To enhance the myth. No-one wants to eat in an empty restaurant. Unless it’s the Tandoori down the road, obvs. So the queue serves as a statement as to how desperate loads of people are to eat there. But heh, half an hour at the bar, Indian beer, we were happy. I asked the barman if he had any urine-encrusted peanuts or something to accompany the beer, like they do at ‘bars’. He said he’d get the menu for me. I told him to fuck off.

The food is simply wonderful. Not necessarily ‘cheap’ but wonderful. The staff are fab. Everything there is slick and superb. The mutton curry was ‘to die for’. As that sheep obviously did.

We befriended the manager. She was delightful. Or she befriended us. It’s her job. And when the bill arrived, I looked at it, stared in wide-eyed shock, but just before I started crying, Mya (the manager) whizzed past, grabbed the bill and said, ‘oh, let me just take this back a minute…’ Our waiter brought it back with a £25 reduction. It still had the service charge, but the total was reduced. I was so thrilled I chose not to tell the boatman and charged him half the original amount. Well, we were both a bit pissed by then, so who cares?

If you haven’t been, you simply have to. Though after the budget…

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx