668 Streatham High Road, London SW16 (020 8679 9980). Meal for two, including service, £35
You can't miss the newest outpost of the Lahore Kebab House, on Streatham High Road. I've not been missing it for months now, every time I have driven south from my home towards Croydon. It's big and it's white and its windows are filled with the kind of flashing fairy lights that newsreaders warn you about lest the next report should encourage an epileptic fit. Every time I've driven past it I've asked myself why I was going to Croydon – or worse still, Ikea – when I could be inside this glittering palace of a Pakistani grill house. To be honest, I always ask myself why I'm going to Ikea, regardless of whether I've driven past the Lahore, but the prospect of serious tandoori lamb-chop action just out of reach adds to the sense of flatpack ennui.
My overheated fetish for meats grilled in the Pakistani style, all dark crust and spice rub and fiery spicing, has been well recorded here. The mother ship for these things is Tayyabs in Whitechapel, and it was apparently a nephew of its founder, Mohammad Tayyab, who set up the first Lahore nearby in London's East End a few decades back. This is to be appreciated because, wonderful as Tayyabs continues to be, the queues do build up, so other possibilities, including the Mirch Masala chain and Needoo's Grill, are welcome.
As is the sight of this huge Lahore, with its flashing windows. Curiously, this is a bit of misdirection, for inside it is the antithesis of flash and sparkle, with one enormous, bland canteen space and tables so broad you wonder whether you might have to text your conversation to your companions. It also has the heaviest chairs I have come across. You can build up an appetite just pulling them out. Almost all the clientele was Asian, though I'm not one to hold much store by this. I know of many lousy Chinese restaurants full of Chinese people. It is merely proof that authentic is not always the same as good.
What then of the Lahore? For the most part the cooking is bright and fresh, and compared to the silly prices charged in so many restaurants, very cheap, the low cost aided by the lack of an alcohol licence, though you can bring your own and they will be so accommodating as to offer a bottle opener or corkscrew. The good news is that in the serious business of seared meats they score. We ordered the mixed grill for £12, which brought a bit of everything. The all-important lamb chops had a good amount of meat on them, a proper cheek-coating crust with a not unwelcome citrus burst at the end as if they'd been doused in lemon juice as they came off the flame. Seekh kebabs – minced lamb – were soft and tender and not overly fiery. The stars, though, were pieces of tandoori fish. In a cooking culture which favours the mallet over the feather, the thump over the tickle, there's always the risk that fish will be cooked until it surrenders. Here, the flakes fell apart with just the tap of the fork, and the rub did not overwhelm its flavour.
It was the same with the fish curry, the star of the main courses, not least because others were so disappointing. The dry lamb curry which should be a dark, dense – and yes, dry – burst of flavour, was here slippery and wet and deflating. A special of quail curry simply proved that smothering small bony birds in sauce is not such a great idea. Happily the makhani dahl was a big slap of umami, rather than that cloying exercise in edible tile grout it can become in clumsy hands.
We finished by striking out for the sunny uplands of type 2 diabetes with spongy Indian desserts in lakes of syrup and of their type they were great.
This then, reads as a mixed review and I suppose it is, but against this must be put the price. At less than £20 a head it really is difficult to feel hard done by. And there's always the lamb chops. Which may well end up being the epitaph on my gravestone.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
