Telephone: 020 7359 8019
Address: The Afghan Kitchen, 35 Islington Green, London N1.
Lunch for two, including wine and service, £40.
Shortly after the numbing events of 11 September, I tried to work out how I should reflect them in this column. My conclusion was that I shouldn't; that, in times like these, we need refuge from gloom and misery. I happily enlisted in the Third Battalion, Restaurant Critics, commanded to pretend that nothing at all unusual was going on anywhere. Like Geri Halliwell entertaining the troops (only with bigger tits, since she lost all that weight) my business is morale and jollity.
But then a friend mentioned a restaurant in Islington called the Afghan Kitchen and I decided to suspend my self-imposed ban on mentioning the news, if only for a week. If good food is representative of anything it is normality and stability, the luxury not merely to fill the stomach but to fill it with good things. The pictures on our TV screens of war in Kabul tell us only one simplified story about Afghanistan. The flavours in the Afghan Kitchen surely tell us another. It is worth going there to taste normality.
It would be pushing it to suggest there is anything about the look of this café-cum- takeaway that is representative of the country whose cooking it serves. I admit that I have not been to Afghanistan, but I'm guessing there are few places there right now favouring the whitewashed walls and blond-wood refectory tables look. That, to me, is a plus. I hate restaurants that strive for some faux-authenticity in the setting in the vain hope that it will somehow emphasise the authenticity of the food.
Instead the Afghan Kitchen is simply a light, clean and utilitarian space. In the small downstairs room are a couple of long tables and a glass counter laid out with large pots of the stews available each day. Upstairs are a few more refectory tables. The menu is equally straightforward and, according to legend, has not changed in the six years since it was opened by Habib Kawyani, an Afghani former news cameraman for Channel 4 and the BBC, who first came to Britain 20 years ago.
Afghanistan, we now know, is a complex place, heavily influenced by the countries on its borders. It was also a staging post on the Silk Route, and all of those things will have influenced its cooking. It's probably safe to assume that the short menu at the Afghan Kitchen is a snapshot of a small part of the repertoire.
There are four meat dishes and four vegetarian dishes, all costing between £4.50 and £6. What is most striking are the colours: the vibrant orange of the borani kado, or sweet pumpkin cooked in yoghurt; the rich purple of bonjan barani, or stewed aubergines; the yellows of the lentil dhal. My companion and I passed on these and went for two of the meat dishes, each with their own distinct colours.
Suzhi gosht was a dark, sea-green stew of lamb and spinach. The leaves were cooked down until they were almost a loose paste with a taste that worked well with the tender, slow-cooked pieces of lamb that broke up on the tongue. I'd try to claim authoritatively that the stew was rich in either nutmeg or mace, were it not for the fact that Habib's wife, Palwasha, who does the cooking, refused to tell me what was in the mix she was using. 'One of Habib's rules,' she said.
Qurma-e-murgh kachala was a slightly sweet, mild stew of chicken with potatoes. Though the chicken had benefited from the same long, slow cooking as the lamb, the potatoes still had a little bite. It was an interesting mixture of textures and all comforting stuff. A bowl of pilau rice, at £2, was light and fluffy. Another of Afghan mixed pickles, heavy with chillies and garlic, was sharp and fiery and contained the only good use for a Brussels sprout I've come across. Pickled like this it was edible.
The menu describes the food as 'traditional Afghan home cooking'. Having not been inside an Afghan home I have no way of judging its authenticity. The kitchen would say only that the spice mixes had been slightly altered for western tastes. Still, I'd presume that even the Taliban regime would find some of this enjoyably familiar, though they are less likely to be taken by the short wine list, which includes two reds, two whites and a champagne.
When peace and stability returns to Kabul, when people can stop worrying about bombs and start wondering once more about what should go in the cooking pot, they'd have good cause to open a few bottles of that champagne at the Afghan Kitchen.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
