Jaya, 36 Church Walks, Llandudno LL30 2HN (01492 818 198). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £70
They are playing bridge in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Llandudno. Outside, early autumn winds tease the sea into peaks the colour of tarnished silver and the road along the front is slicked from the showers just passed. Inside, all is spades over hearts, winning tricks and the ballad of minor suits. They come here every year, these bridge players, and fill their days with rubber after rubber. The hotel smells of furniture polish and this morning’s breakfast buffet and, most of all, certainty. It is not just the building which is solid and redoubtable. Here, life itself feels that way.
And so you make assumptions. Or at least I do. A night in Llandudno, which needs to be filled with dinner? What can I hope for? A bit of fish, simply cooked, perhaps? That would be nice. Or is it to be pockmarked by dinners accessorised by white oval side dishes of over-boiled cauliflower that no one ever eats? I am trying to travel hopefully, but I have travelled so far and wide and hope is fragile in the face of bitter experience.
As my mother always used to do in such circumstances, I reach for the Good Food Guide. It’s barely worth pointing out how crowded the restaurant guide market has become, both online and off. I am tolerant of a few. I am suspicious of some and utterly dismissive of others. Oh, TripAdvisor, you rancid echo chamber for the sound of badly ground knives. Where others have a modicum of good taste you have a “revenue generation model”, and desperation.
But the Good Food Guide? The fat, dog-eared copy that sat on the windowsill of my mother’s office, its spine broken, was a greedy person’s journal of hope. It may have changed ownership a few times since it was first launched in 1951 by Raymond Postgate in a mission to bring pleasure to a postwar Britain that had mislaid the habit, but it still does the thing. It was a model of crowd-sourced opinion long before the first computer was even plugged in.
When the latest edition was published in September it included a list of local restaurants which made me blink. There were some I’d reviewed among them, but there were others I’d never even heard of. And don’t tell me it’s because I don’t get out of London enough; the wad of train ticket receipts in my wallet and my encyclopaedic knowledge of the East Coast timetable says otherwise. As does the sound of my kids asking my wife who the strange man sitting down for dinner with them is. In just one week I managed Helmsley, Newcastle, Cheltenham and here, Llandudno. I get around and, like a proper food slut, I eat around, too, my gastronomic knickers forever round my ankles. If I’ve missed a great find, it’s because there are now too many for one greedy mortal. Let’s take that local heroes list as a mark of good things happening.
Certainly it made sense when looking for somewhere to eat on the Welsh coast to turn to the Good Food Guide. On the downside my fears were confirmed by the fact that there was just one entry for the entire town. On the upside, what an entry. Jaya belongs to Sunita and Bobby Katoch – she’s in the kitchen, he’s front of house – and serves Punjabi food by way of East Africa. At the heart of its kitchen is a series of freshly roasted spice mixes, which lift the food a long way from the overly familiar batch cooking that rules too many so-called Indians in Britain (in reality, mostly Bengali).
The setting is thoroughly domestic: a white stucco villa on a residential street set back from the seafront which, inside, has been given a gentle makeover. These rooms have chairs and shiny tables, like a proper restaurant, but could quite easily become someone’s living room all over again. A group of us rampage through the menu. From the specials there are lamb chops, marinated in their own lime pickle, which is all fire and acidity. The heat of the oven has mellowed the punch a little but turned it into something deeper and more savoury. The chops are pink at the middle, the fat crisp and running. I make a note to start marinating all my meat in lime pickle.
There is baby squid in a light sauce full of cracked black pepper, and jeera chicken, pieces of breast cooked off in a rough-hewn roasted spice mix – half way between a grind and a sauce – which turns the meat into a vehicle for aromatics. Pili pili boga brings pieces of aubergine, cauliflower, bell peppers and mushrooms tossed in a masala and cornflour and deep fried, to produce a kind of Indian tempura. There is a sweet-sour tamarind sauce on the side, to help it all on its way. The same dipping sauce turns up alongside a soft, blowsy spiced potato cake, all crisp shell and fragrant innards, with a dish of chickpeas in a tomato and coriander sauce.
The great challenge of food from the Indian subcontinent is to move it beyond different but strangely similar dun-coloured stews. I can’t quite claim that Jaya manages that. There were indeed a bunch of dun-coloured stews, both of lamb and chicken, and they did have their similarities. But all of them boasted an uncommon depth; of sauces built up (as against reduced down in the French style) starting with freshly roasted spices and then layering punch and heat and power. Two stood out. One was a brilliant fish masala, which was sweet and earthy and full of hunks of salmon which, remarkably, still had enough in the tank to taste of themselves. The other was a non-meat curry of boiled eggs and potatoes which, curiously, was the meatiest of the lot – it took the soothing eggs to calm everything down.
We mopped at the sauces with freshly baked naans, their edges blistered from the heat, the insides soft and steaming. We tore off pieces of flaky “koya” naan backfilled with coconut and raisins, and calmed the heat with cups of pomegranate raita. We drank pints of Cobra and gave thanks for our lot: for finding our way to Llandudno off-season and, courtesy of the Good Food Guide, to the doorstep of Jaya. Perhaps I should learn to play bridge. Perhaps it would make me a proper grown-up. But I’m really not that man. A night being fed cracking Punjabi food suits me rather better.
Jay’s news bites
■ Like Jaya, the cult Hot Stuff in Vauxhall, south London, draws on the East African background of its founders for its Indian food. It is bright, vital and cheap. Few dishes cost more than £8. Then again, it’s a simple place where the emphasis is on the food. Go for curries of lamb with butternut squash, sag chicken, and fresh blistered breads straight from the oven (welovehotstuff.com).
■ Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft who in 2011 published a multi-volume work on modernist cooking, has now turned his attention to bread. Modernist Bread: The Art and Science by Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, former pastry chef at the French Laundry, will be published in five volumes
in May 2017. Price: £425.
■ North Yorkshire is the place for fish and chips, with three of the top 10 chippies in the National Fish and Chip Shop Awards located there. They are Trenchers and The Fisherman’s Wife, both in Whitby, and Mister C’s in Selby. The outright winner will be announced in January.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
