Gul and Sepoy, 65 Commercial Street, London E1 6BD (020 7247 1407). Meal for two, including alcohol, £120
Sometimes it just doesn’t matter how good individual dishes are. It doesn’t matter if there are things that sounded the trumpets and made the angels sing. If, at the end of the meal you feel baffled or let down or short changed – or worse than that, all three – you know you won’t be back. So it is with Gul & Sepoy, a new, modish restaurant in London’s Spitalfields, offering a clever menu of dishes from the Indian subcontinent which isn’t quite as clever as it thinks it is.
Perhaps it’s the difficult third album syndrome. Until now Harneet and Devina Baweja have had only hits on their hands. Their two other places, both nearby, have been greeted with rapturous applause and dribbling. There’s Gunpowder, which features family recipes and Madame D, which majors on the cooking of the Himalayas. They have investigated regional Indian food with gusto and lack of ceremony.
Gul & Sepoy is meant to be a more upmarket offering than its siblings. That only makes me wonder how basic the other two are. The décor here is so distressed it needs a really good hug. The plaster is raw and rough, as if waiting for you to scrape your knee on it; perhaps they fell out with the builders before completion. A downstairs door marked “washroom” is obstructed by a pot plant, to suggest it’s not in use, which is a blessing. It’s never a good look when the entire dining room knows you’re off for a slash. Efficiently, on a cold November lunchtime, the open front door channels chilly air right to the back corner. We ask for it to be closed more than once.
As to the menu, it’s meant to be a game of two halves. One side, listed as Gul, represents the food served in the royal palaces of northern India. The other side, headed Sepoy, is the food eaten by soldiers patrolling India’s coastal regions. It’s so specific it’s verging on the nerdy – though, to be fair, you have to be a total restaurant nerd to find out about it. I’m the sort of tragic individual who searches the web for this kind of vital intelligence. The waiter didn’t explain any of it beyond inviting us to order five or so dishes between two. We found seven does the trick.
On balance I’d rather be a soldier than a prince, but only just and only if you don’t look at the prices. I enjoyed the unashamed punch and heat of burnt achari cauliflowers and new potatoes, smeared in fiery pickles and then roasted to within an inch of their lives, alongside a dollop of cooling yogurt to soften the blow. For £6 you get three new potatoes and two large cauliflower florets. Don’t calculate the raw ingredient cost because it will drive you nuts. Then again, sometimes the profit margin is just too stark. Cubes of chicken thigh have been drenched in a livid green wild garlic purée and grilled to dark and smoky. It is a noble, pungent end for two chicken thighs. At time of writing the website says this will cost you £6.50 which is a fair price. The printed menu in the restaurant will tell you they cost £11, which is – forgive the vernacular – bloody outrageous.
It’s a similar deal with their royal guchi pilau rice dish (£14 online, £16 if you want to eat it) and their potted pig with masala onions (£8 online, £11 in real life). Why is it never the other way around? Why is it never more expensive online than in the restaurant? The potted pig brings strands of slow cooked pork under a “top soil” of onions cooked down in masala wine, all of it served in a mini-plant pot. The surface has been studded with fronds of green, grass-like herbs. Hurrah! It’s twice potted pork! I can live with whimsy, but not when the pork is underseasoned, the onions oversweet and the surface scattered with bits of crisped pig skin that are so hard you fear for your middle-aged teeth.
The escargot with moong daal and spinach kichdi is less baffling than troubling. It’s a pool of deep green stewed down pulses, scattered with black snails and topped with pearly white pickled and shaved fennel. Have a look at the picture then Google an image of Heston Blumenthal’s famed snail porridge. I hope to God it’s an homage, because they look exactly the same. The problem is, against the thrill of Blumenthal’s garlicky, pow and crack of oats supercharged with a strident persillade, this is just ho hum. The daal is dreary, underpowered and relentless. It did indeed remind me of snail porridge: how much better it was than this.
A mutton fry, served in a tiny hot pan under a plug of rubbery beaten egg, is also bizarrely bland. At which point I’m afraid I have to go all wistful and mention the Pakistani grill houses just down the road in Whitechapel and their brilliant dry mutton curries; dishes of darkness and power, akin to a deep tissue massage that makes you grunt with effort and purr with delight.
From the royal list the three-bird Awadhi korma is extremely pretty to look at. Boned out chicken, pheasant and pigeon have been formed into a cylinder, simmered, sliced and then seared. It is laid in a deep puddle of korma sauce, an embarrassment of cream, almonds and low-key spice. The sauce is great, the meat less so. We stare around the table for a little salt. There is none. The best dish of the lot comes from this side of the menu. A whole sea bream, slapped around with a chilli paste then roasted in the tandoor, miraculously boned out and then reassembled, alongside a big heap of crunchy pickled radish.
For dessert there is a dark chocolate ganache which is simply too rich. It manages to make the other dessert, discs of rum soaked sponge, like a grown-up gulab jamun, with whorls of spiced, overwhipped cream, seem light. It isn’t. Only at the end, when they bring the bill, do they mention it is the penultimate day of their soft opening. Normally, I would hesitate before reviewing, but the soft opening discount is only 10%. Given both the differences between online and real pricing, and pricing generally, I’m not pulling this punch. That fish is a joy. I like the chicken skewers. I enjoyed the cauliflower. But none of that justifies a whacking bill of £98, both with a discount and without any booze.
Jay’s news bites
If you’re not interested in anybody reinventing the wheel, head to the Needoo Grill just down the road in Whitechapel. There’s nothing artful about it – they just serve generous platefuls of Punjabi food, including a dry meat curry of uncommon depth and clarity. The proposition is basic and so is the price, with £20 a head seeing you right (needoogrill.co.uk).
West London is to get Europe’s biggest Japanese food hall with the opening of Ichiba, part of the 740,000 sq ft expansion of Westfield London. The new 17,400 sq ft superstore is a collaboration between the Japan Centre Group and the Cool Japan Fund. It will include both food stations and a supermarket and will open in March 2018.
For the past two years chef Ben Churchill, aka the Food Illusionist, has been wowing fans with online videos of his whimsical dessert creations: think the edible washing-up sponge, or beans on toast cake. Now they’re available as a self-published book, Food Illusions Vol 1, via Amazon.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
