Telephone: 020 7434 9899
Address: 139 Wardour Street, London W1
Lunch for two, including soft drinks and service, £30.
Indian restaurants in Britain are so very rarely Bollywood. They're more Ealing studios: small-scale, homespun, sweet and reliable for what they are. It is a mark of its ubiquity that, while the food served in British 'Indian' restaurants originates in a land many thousands of miles away which the vast majority of us have never visited, the last thing we consider it to be is exotic. Nor do we expect glamour from Indian restaurants. For the most part we demand only the familiar, and because the restaurateurs who dominate the business - generally Bengalis - know which side their naan is buttered, that's what they give us.
There have been recent attempts to move Indian food on, to give it the glamour and excitement that top-class European restaurants can possess (cue wine list with lots of big Burgundies and Bordeaux at 400 per cent mark-up) and an awful lot has been written about it, probably out of all proportion to the size of the movement. Places in London such as Zaika and Tamarind, each with their Michelin star, may be genuinely thrilling, but they have made no impact on high-street curry houses. Out there, on the poppadom-strewn and lager-soaked battleground of Saturday nights, it's still business as usual. I also wonder whether the new breed of classy Indian restaurants are any more authentic than the bog-standard curry houses.
I doubt, for example, that there's anything like Ophim anywhere in India, although it does at least get closer to being more Bollywood than Ealing, by dint of its location on Soho's Wardour Street, slap-bang in the middle of London's film industry. It is a sleek place of white walls and clean lines and wipe-down surfaces. Remove the chairs and tables and it could probably stand in as a butcher's shop. Down the stairs, just inside the front door, is a restaurant described as 'fine dining', which is a phrase I hate. Generally, it means nothing other than 'a place where we charge very, very high prices and keep trying to fill up your wine glass so you'll order another bottle'. Certainly the price thing applies here. Starters begin at £6.50. Main courses cost around £17.
On the ground floor is what they describe as a brasserie. It has a pricing formula which, in its own way, is every bit as ambitious as that down below in the basement. Here lunch costs just £7.50. Yes. You read right - £7.50. In the evenings, the same menu, supplemented by a couple of extra meat dishes, costs £12.50. It had to be worth trying.
The brasserie is designed, I think, to look 'ironically' like a 'work's canteen' but the design is so spare and cool that it just looks like a work's canteen, without the quotation marks. Perhaps the bleached-out shades had dulled the senses of the barman, because he barely seemed to hear me when I asked if I could pull up a seat and wait for my friend. He just shrugged and went back to reading his newspaper. He certainly didn't offer me a drink and, just to spite him, I didn't try to order one, either. Things brightened up considerably when I was joined by Simon, the TV mogul. We were shown to a table by the wall in the near empty room and given the run down by our friendly waitress. At lunchtime the menu lists 14 dishes. We would be brought all of them and then, if we wanted more of anything we would be given refills at no extra cost.
This wasn't as many dishes as it sounds, in fact, because four of them - vegetable pakora, fillets of fried tilapia, some marinated chargrilled potatoes and a chunk of tandoor-roasted chicken breast - turned up as an assortment in one bowl for each of us, placed at the end of our plate. The rest of the dishes were then laid out prettily in small bowls along a rather elegant stone platter down the middle of the table - a thali by any other name.
Judged on the basis of price, it's pretty damn remarkable, though four of the dishes didn't work. Chicken breast in a sweet tomato and butter sauce, for example, was too reminiscent of chicken tikka masala; kichdi, described as a lentil and rice 'risotto' was too salty and soupy; the tomato was half of a tomato; and the aubergine mash tasted like canned purée. And new potatoes in a pond of mint and yogurt sauce was a bit of a sloppy mess.
But we agreed that everything else was great, starting with good, fresh, crisp pieces of naan which kept coming, and bowls of sprightly tamarind and mint sauce to dip them in. The tilapia fish fillets were well-spiced and clearly cooked to order. Nihari, a dark stew of slow-braised lamb, boasted beautifully tender meat and a rich intense sauce. Channa chaat - chickpeas with red onions, green chillies and coriander in lime juice - was clean and fresh. We asked for refills of all of those. I also enjoyed the bhindi do pyaza, a loose assembly of okra with red onions and tomatoes, and the rice, flavoured with cumin and bay leaf, was good and nutty.
I'm not claiming this is innovative food. It is, for the most part, merely competent cooking, lifted perhaps by a greater interest in fresh green herbs than is usual at your average curry house. We added a refreshing glass each of mango- and strawberry-flavoured lassi, some mineral water and a couple of coffees, and the bill for two, including service, came to £30. It's not enough to get me bursting into song down the thronging avenues of Soho, Bollywood-style, but after so many disappointing big ticket events, it did put a swing in my step.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
