The Cat’s Pyjamas, 9 Eastgate, Leeds LS2 7LY (0113 234 0454). Also in Headingley. Meal for two, including drinks and service: £60
When it comes to the vital business of dinner, we idealise the bespoke. Give us a seat in a 12-cover restaurant, with a kitchen so small there’s only space for the venerated head chef and someone to do their washing-up, and we’re happy. We want that cook’s hands to touch the ingredients we eat. We do not want to be part of some huge mass that merely needs servicing. In the matter of our appetites we are all of us solipsists.
The problem is that, while we want to eat somewhere small scale and intimate, few of us want to pay for it. Heaven forefend the poor, knackered cook, working alone in the kitchen, should make a living, let alone a good one. Instead, the well-travelled and the expatriate bang on about the tiny trattoria they found in the Umbrian hills or the taverna at the arse end of Mykonos, where some twinkly eyed but arthritic mamma served up a glorious feast for six, and then paid you for deigning to eat it. Differences in rents and wages never occur to these happy diners as they venerate the humble, and slag off the iniquities of Britain’s urbanised society.
In restaurants, as in most things, there are benefits to scale, mostly measured in pounds and pence. There are, of course, degrees of this. There is one well-known chain of restaurants, drawing on the traditions of parts of Asia, that appears to have a standard made-to-order menu but which, behind the kitchen doors, is mostly a buffet. Huge vats of the most popular dishes are lined up along the pass, for the waiters to fill bowls from. It’s effective and clever, and keeps prices down.
The Cat’s Pyjamas, the second branch of which opened on Eastgate in Leeds at the end of last year, cannot use such economically helpful devices; the kitchen is housed in a faux shack of corrugated iron jutting into the room like it’s a Mumbai caff, and is pretty much open. You can see the cooks doing their thing. But there’s no doubting this is a high-volume operation. It opens at 5pm and is quickly half full. That explains the bargain price of just £10.95 for a whole sea bream. It is slicked with a pulp of lemongrass and chilli, ginger and lime bashed into its slashed skin, then given a roasting in one of the tandoors. The skin is bubbled and blackened, but salty and powerful. Beneath is the white flesh, ready to fall from the bone. On the side is a salad, heavy with diced red onion. Eat here with a friend.
The Cat’s Pyjamas describes itself as the home of “Indian street food and craft beer”, which will sound familiar to anyone who read my review of Bundobust, also born in Leeds. There is a key difference: this one includes meat and fish on the menu, so it’s slightly more expensive. But if you can have multitudinous French restaurants which are all different but also strangely similar, then you can have more than one place like this. All that matters is whether it makes the grade. In the main, the Cat’s Pyjamas does.
It was founded by local businesswoman Alison White, with multi-garlanded chef Alfred Prasad consulting on the food. The decor is pure Bollywood meets Scrapheap Challenge. It’s hard surfaces and metalwork, vivid colours and that open kitchen, filled with intense-looking Asian chaps attaching meat to skewers.
There is little on the menu that will startle. There’s a rogan josh, a saag paneer and a whole tandoori chicken. Some of the descriptions are a little eager to please, bigging up the wildly popular antecedents of each dish. They love it so you will. But the essentials are all there. Pani puri, six for £4.50, are crisp, hollow, deep-fried bowls, enough for a mouthful, even mine. They are filled with spiced potato, onion and tamarind chutney, and the gaudiness of pomegranate seeds. They are extremely pretty, as if auditioning for the part of an earth mother’s costume jewellery. Into the spiced dipping sauce on the side then into your mouth whole; there’s no other way. The puri swiftly collapse, giving up the soft filling and with it a memory, of the brilliant ones served at the long-gone and much-missed Kastoori of Tooting. This is high praise.
A tandoori mixed grill for £6.95 is striking for its stridency. The hefty prawns and the chicken are still very much themselves, but the marinade, blast-roasted to crispiness, has a serious kick to it, which makes you blink, likewise the minced lamb kebabs – the meat dotted with fresh red chilli. There is a mint concoction halfway between a chutney and a sauce. It’s the colour of grass clippings after a good mulch in the composter, but bright and light – a gentle pat on the back to reassure you everything will be OK.
From the mains there’s that sea bream, and a makhani dal that bobs with whole lentils and, as dal always does, punches above its weight. It lends weight to the meal. A garlic naan is crisp and smoky; a Yorkshire cheese naan, ordered because it would be rude not to in Leeds, is the sort of thing you order early here, when you have somehow managed to arrive drunk. It’s oily, melted cheese and oven-scorched bread. It’s filth.
I am in two minds over their keema matar, a sweet stew of ground lamb, flavoured with, ginger, garlic, crisped onions and fresh peas. It feels like the dish the naan was baked for, and shovelling away at it with the bread starts to become a compulsion, but it’s just slightly too loose and slightly too sweet. And yet, by the end, I have eaten most of it by myself. Fried chicken is a little dry, being strips of breast; make it with thigh and everything would be better. Thigh improves most things. The one disappointment, given the punch of what follows, is the chutneys with the poppadums, which are mostly mellow and sweet. The heat elsewhere makes up for it.
The wine list is short and mediocre, but the beer selection is far more impressive, including the Jaipur India Pale Ale from Thornbridge and Three Swords from the nearby Kirkstall Brewery Company. And yet, for all that intense localism, I suspect wider ambitions here. Like Bundobust, it feels roll-out ready. There are even greater economies of scale in the offing. If they can keep the standards up, most high streets would be happy to have one of these.
Jay’s news bites
■ The Gujarati vegetarian restaurant Hansa’s opened in Leeds when I was a student there, which is to say three decades ago. It is still going strong, offering up big-fisted curries and street snacks. Try one of their thalis at £13.95, including two of their curries, dal, roti, rice, a glass of lassi and a bunch of other things. £15.25 per person gets you a banquet for six (hansasrestaurant.com).
■ Will Smith, a long-time fixture in London, running front of house at the much admired Arbutus and its siblings, with his chef partner Anthony Demetre until their closure last year, has opened a neighbourhood bistro in Helensburgh, the Sugar Boat. The chef will be Scott Smith, formerly of Arbutus.
■ Meanwhile Edinburgh is to get an outpost of the fast-growing ‘Ivy Collection’ Group on St Andrew’s Square, following the opening of others in Marlow and Bristol. While trading on the name, iconography and reputation of The Ivy in London’s Theatreland, the team there has minimal involvement with the new group, though they share the same owner.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
