Mumtaz
400 Great Horton Road, Bradford
(01274 571 861)
Meal for two, including drinks, £45
I have developed an odd habit. Whenever the take-away menu from a neighbourhood Indian restaurant lands on my doormat I search it for references to lamb chops. Ever since I first visited Tayyabs in London's Whitechapel, where the long-marinated tandoori-roasted chops are a thing of wonder - rich spicy meat, succulent fat, lots of bone nibble-age - just the Technicolor flash of a take-away menu's cover has had me dreaming about them. Sometimes, stupidly, I have ordered them. They have always been a disappointment. Never black enough. Never intense enough. Never 'oh my gosh' enough.
So I make little apology for the fact that when I went in search of a trio of good places serving food from the Indian sub-continent, two of them had similar geographical origins to Tayyabs - one was Kashmiri, one Pakistani - and that, at both of those, I tried the chops. I will say now that neither matched the true wondrousness of the Tayyabs experience (few do) but they were pretty good substitutes. All three restaurants were a long way from being generic curry houses, peddling that bogus 'Indian' food which infects so many of our high streets. And between them they have clocked up almost 70 years in business. So they must be doing something right.
Mumtaz in Bradford - or the 'world-famous' Mumtaz, as it grandly styles itself - has now been catering to the city's Kashmiri community for 27 years. By the entrance is a sign marking the site of the original restaurant, which measured just four metres by three metres. Today Mumtaz is a glass and chrome edifice which stretches over almost an entire block of the Great Horton Road. Half of it is taken over by a sweetshop, deli and a counter selling branded goods - Mumtaz cooking sauces, pickles, even baby food - and beyond that, on a few levels of marble floors, leather sofas and wipe-down tables, is the restaurant itself. If there is a criticism it is that the place is so damn flash that it feels a little corporate, down to the name badges on the waiters.
But none of that carries over to the food, which manages to combine butch, strident spicing with the aromatics of fresh herbs. We liked the karahi lamb soukha bouhna, a dry curry in which the meat was served on the bone, and a similar chicken dish, with lots of sauce action designed perfectly for its huge nans, which are the size of Belgium. We made the mistake of ordering two.
But the star was a karahi fish. Usually I avoid fish curries, assuming the delicate flavours will be bitch-slapped by the spicing, but this managed to have an uncommon and sprightly freshness to it. The lamb chops? Not bad at all. There was lots of flavour, though they were a little dry, and suffered from being misshapen cuts of animal. A good lamb chop always looks like a lamb chop.
About half the menu is vegetarian, there's a long list of freshly squeezed juices, and they will apparently serve you chips, though if you order them you deserve to be poked in the eye with a finger dipped in their lime pickle.
Mumtaz is not dirt cheap - some locals complained to me that it is over-priced - but that is based on the mistaken assumption that this sort of food isn't worth much. And it's hardly larceny: starters are around £3, main courses at £7. If you manage to spend more than £25 a head here (given that they do not serve alcohol) you must be trying very hard indeed. Or be me.
Mirch Masala
1416 London Road, Norbury, London SW16
(020 8679 1828)
Meal for two, including drinks, £25
Mirch Masala is also dry, though they do allow you to bring in your own booze, and lots of the Asian men around us were doing just that - and not just any old booze. We're talking the hard stuff: there on the tables were bottles of Chivas Regal, and quarters of brandy.
This Mirch Masala opened 11 years ago and, to be honest, it looks like it. No flashy chrome and marble floors here. This is pure Formica and polystyrene ceiling tiles. My companion, a sometime traveller in India, said it was the most authentic looking place he had ever been to in Britain, down to the bright white, unforgiving strip lights and the adverts on the walls for travel agents.
But it hasn't exactly held them back. There are three other branches in London already - in Tooting, Southall, and the Commercial Road - with a fifth shortly to open in Goodmayes in Essex. The appeal is clear. This is the place for smoky Pakistani grilled meats; for minced lamb seekh kebabs of an uncommon succulence, and for lamb chops, served sliced thin with wedges of lemon. There was also a great dish called mixed fry - onion, garlic, ginger and green chillies - sauteed to a crisp golden brown, which was completely irresistible. If I'm honest, the curries - something with lamb, something with chicken, both flavoured with fenugreek - did rather conform to the dun-coloured stew model. In the memory they are indistinguishable, but that is not to suggest that either was bad. Lots of stewy flavour. Lots of soft meat, and very little to complain about at a fiver a pop.
The next morning, though, I suffered for this one. It was not just the spicing - we had asked for everything to be served medium - but what I can only describe as an enthusiastic use of fats. At the time it gave everything we ate a satisfying, mouth-filling depth of flavour. The next morning, though, it gave me a few uneasy lurches on the train into town and I realised, not for the first time, that however much I love this sort of food - and I do - I can't do a whole lot of it.
But hell, I had a job to do and I knew exactly what I needed. And that was some vegetarian food. Let's pause for a moment so regular readers can take that in: yes, I actually wanted vegetarian food. What you have to understand is that the kind of vegetarianism I hate is the bogus stuff that hunts around for ways to substitute meat - think nut cutlets and roasts, vegetarian moussakas and lasagnes, all of them culinary abominations. By contrast, India's vegetarian traditions have a deeply held and well constructed internal logic - and the best place to experience it is on Belgrave Road in Leicester...
The Chaat House
108 Belgrave Road, Leicester
(0116 266 0513)
Meal for two, including drinks, £20
The Chaat House opened 30 years ago next month and is a simple space of bare wood floors, crimson walls and leatherette booths. It is owned by the Gupta family and all the cooking is done by the matriarch, Annu, who appears from the kitchen to prepare starters at the bar at the front of the restaurant.
There she constructed my bhel puri: puffed rice, crunchy fried crisps and Indian savouries, spicy potatoes, fresh onions, tamarind seed sauce and coriander and onion chutney. That is the description from the menu and I can do no better. Chaat is street food, and this had the instant satisfying hit that the best street foods boast. It was a huge aluminium dish piled high with that mouth dance of a mixture. After that a thali with perfectly judged servings of aloo brinjal (a soft and yielding aubergine and potato curry) and matar paneer (peas and homemade cheese in tomato sauce). There was fluffy rice and dal and their boisterous but not overwhelming lime pickle and, to soothe the palate, a little raita.
Finally, I had a syrup-sodden gulab jamin, the classic Indian milk-based dumpling, which brought the spicing, and this journey, to a final juddering halt. And a bill for all this of £12, which is, of course, ludicrous. Unlike the food.
