Tayyabs, 83-89 Fieldgate Street, London E1 (020 7247 6400).
Meal for two, including service, £40
For many years Tayyabs, a Pakistani restaurant hidden away in the tight knot of streets around London's Whitechapel, was actually four food outlets: at one end was the original, Tayyabs, which opened in the Seventies. Next to that was their cafe, followed by their Indian sweet shop. Finally, at the far end was New Tayyabs, a converted pub. Both Tayyabs and New Tayyabs served the same menu. It was just that the original closed at 5pm, when all the staff moved down the street to New Tayyabs. Quite why they did this nobody is really sure.
Nor did anybody care. These were simple places, serving simple food in very simple surroundings: no one ever went to Tayyabs for tips on interior decorating. I never ate there in its old incarnation, but I knew a lot of people who did, who described it as the very best place in London for kebabs and Tandoor roasted meats. They made no secret of the fact that they thought my failure to have experienced Tayyabs for myself marked me out as both gastronomic fraud and ignoramus.
Earlier this year it reopened simply as Tayyabs. The four premises have been knocked through to create one impressive eating space: there are black marble floors with spangly bits in some rooms, and walls painted shades of peach and burnt umber. The chairs are bound in caramel-coloured leather. There's even a riot of gilding in the private room.
The menu, however, remains the same, as do the prices, which are gloriously low - made lower still by the fact that it is unlicensed and charges no corkage fees. If you spend £20 a head here it is because you are trying very hard. Personally, I would advise trying to do so, because its fans were right. It really is rather special. There are two things worth trying at Tayyabs. All of the meats and all of the breads. You can order vegetables if you like, and I'm sure their dhal is up to snuff but, really, why would you?
Start with the lamb chops, four big meaty specimens for £4.20, brought dark and sizzling on a furiously hot iron skillet. Spice-rubbed and marinated to within an inch of their lives, then roasted to a rich, smoky fibrousness, they are the sort of chops you eat twice. First time round you cut off all the obvious meat. Second time round you lift the bones to your gnashers and chew away at the crusty bits. There are chunks of tender chicken tikka, plus long, soft seekh kebabs made from spiced minced lamb which deliver up the sweetness and succulence of the meat before delivering the green-chilli kick. A table full of these and a few plates of their freshly baked rotis, parathas and particularly their keema nan - bread stuffed with minced lamb - and I was very happy indeed.
Still, I managed to find space for their dry meat curry, and dream of it still: hunks of dense lamb, slow cooked in a pungent sauce until it has so reduced it's hard to say where meat ends and sauce begins. More 'sophisticated' restaurants fight for this level of complexity: there are dark-caramel flavours in here, followed by the chilli attack, and then a long, lingering end full of the aromatics of home-roasted spices, which last until the next day. Their pastel-coloured sweetmeats are an acquired taste - so sweet you wonder whether they might not induce diabetes, but a suitable change of gear all the same. Enjoy all of this with a bottle of wine you could never afford off a restaurant wine list, and you too will soon become a Tayyabs groupie.
