3/10
Telephone 08707 426282.
Address 1 Queensway, Southampton, Hampshire.
Open All week, lunch, noon-2pm; dinner, 6-11pm.
Price Around £25 a head, including drinks. No wheelchair access.
The one real surprise about P.O.S.H. ("Port Out, Starboard Home") is that at no stage did Michael Bates totter out and reprise his browned-up punka wallah routine from It Ain't Half Hot Mum. On reflection, given Bates's death in 1978, the one surprise is that P.O.S.H. exists at all, in an anonymous Southampton shopping street or anywhere else.
A place that calls itself an "Indian Colonial" restaurant, styles itself (vaguely) after an ocean liner leaving for the subcontinent in the 1920s, and then attempts to venerate the British empire with allegedly "colonial" dishes - the ensemble run not by some crazed, gin-sodden, BNP-supporting granddaughter of the Raj but by Indian people ... well, you don't get many of those to the rupee, that's for sure.
Possibly the best bit of the experience is the entrance. As though about to embark on a liner bound for Calcutta, you climb a set of stairs lined with ship signs such as "First Class Passengers Only", traverse a loose approximation of a gangplank and enter a vast, overlit space with more spiritual resemblance to a cheap hotel function room than to the dining room of an ocean-going vessel. My friend felt that they'd spent so heavily on stairs and gangplank that they'd run out of budget for the restaurant itself. I think he was right: the odd Edwardian portrait of a girl in an oval frame and a fair smattering of ferns lose their scene-setting power when harnessed to cheap spotlighting and silver disco balls.
Regardless of the mild dementia apparently at play in the conception and execution, or more likely because of it, we were strangely charmed. How do you not warm to a menu that appends a 200-word spiel to a dish entitled P.O.S.H. chicken pie, wittering on amiably about the bobajee (cook) and his efforts to acclimatise to the strange British custom of combining pastry and meat? P.O.S.H. is so endearing in its artlessness that I'd rather not deal with the food at all for fear of upsetting a chef described in the menu as a veteran of India's finest hotels. Sadly, the demands of this job make that a bit tricky, so we'll gloss hurriedly over many dishes, few of which were on speaking terms even with sullen mediocrity.
We knew we were in trouble when the mint sauce accompanying the poppadoms (fresh enough themselves) had the consistency of guacamole and the flavour of antifreeze, and so it went on. A starter of duck with mushroom and red wine (£5.95) relied on a bold but vain attempt to disguise a tasteless bird with a thick, cloying gravy, and if there was any truth in the menu's claim that my charcoal grilled salmon (£5.95) was "definitely one to make your taste buds dance", it was more St Vitus than Fred Astaire. A shared dish from the "Indian Colonial starters" list of king prawn toast (the work, said the menu, of the memsahibs) was a nice idea, but weirdly executed, with lashings of anchovy butter and seasoned to produce a viciously acrid aftertaste. All three came with slices of lime, presumably to ward off scurvy.
The main courses franked the form, my chicken kholapurs (£7.75) being listed as laden with fresh chilli but tasting only of curry powder. There was something appealing about my friend's chicken pie (£8.95), the bobajee having mastered his confusion to produce a huge slathering of creamy, korma-style curry spilling over the side of the plate, its central section topped and bottomed by tiny, crumbly pastry circles. "Very nice idea," said my friend. "Not sure they've quite pulled it off." Side dishes, including a serving of sliced carrots, were adequate and pilau rice was good, but an alleged honey-and-chilli nan (wickedly priced at £2.95) tasted of neither.
We left feeling slightly bamboozled, a little shell-shocked even, by an ambitious and memorable restaurant that might consider toning down the self-congratulatory tone ("Marvellous!", "Perfection!", "Mouth-watering!" and, of course, "Pukka!" are among the epithets given to dishes) for fear of raising expectations it cannot meet. Having said that, the menu does enjoy one foray into cold, hard fact. "We are a restaurant like no other!" it declares on page two, and there's very little arguing with that.
