Lucknow 49, 49 Maddox Street, London W1S 2PQ (020 7491 9191). Starters £6-£16; mains £12-£17.50; desserts £6; wines from £29
While it would be wrong to argue that most of the Indian subcontinent’s food is brown, it’s easy to see how a meal at Lucknow 49, the second London enterprise from chef Dhruv Mittal, might make you reach that conclusion. It’s a parade of dishes which, on a colour chart, would run the gamut from “dark earth” through “silted river bed” all the way to “ploughed field”. Personally, I have no problem with brown food; some of the most intense, strident dishes I have ever eaten have been brown. In cooking, caramelisation is your friend and caramel is brown. Others feel differently. Which may explain why, half way through dinner, I find myself staring at a lightly sauced cauliflower, dressed with a thin scab of shimmering silver leaf.
Some will protest that precious metals as food decoration is a cultural thing, with a venerable history in Indian cookery. But I’m not in India. I’m on Maddox Street on the edge of London’s Mayfair, where there’s already too much pointless gilding. I don’t like eating things which serve no nutritional purpose. I particularly don’t like eating things which are destined to travel straight through me so that the product at the other end turns out so glittery you could hang it on a Christmas tree if, say, Tim Burton was in charge of the decorations.
Apart from offering the opportunity to make poo jokes in a restaurant review – never to be missed – there’s a more serious point here. How do we evaluate a restaurant like this, where the substantial bill clearly pays for things like silver leaf on the cauliflower, which have nothing to do with the food? For a start, Lucknow 49 is a very comfortable restaurant, literally so. The upholstered bench seating is stacked with throw cushions and bolsters – so many, indeed, that I have to chuck a few off to create a space in which to wriggle my sizeable arse. There is olive green paintwork, as well as what looks like hand-printed decoration around the archway into the back-dining room, and blocky floral prints. It’s a self-conscious take on the domestic, the sort of relaxed style that costs proper money. Accordingly, the cheapest bottle of wine is £29 for something drinkable the name of which I can’t recall, and the dinner bill for two will easily break £130.
Let’s stop there for a moment. The fact that you can visit a serviceable high-street curry house and pay buttons for indeterminate animal protein batch-cooked in a glowing sauce, which will repeat on you for days, does not mean food from the Indian tradition should never cost as much as that from France, Italy or Japan. If you believe that, you are dismissing the whole of Indian culture as somehow inferior. You will need to have a long hard talk with yourself.
The food just needs to be worth it. At Lucknow 49, some of it pretty much is and some of it really isn’t. (The £9 paratha wraps stuffed with grilled lamb for takeaway at lunchtime may be the best deal). It all comes with a compelling narrative: after the fall of the Mughal empire, the royal family and their cooks shifted from Delhi to Lucknow. The double lamb chops here, cooked over charcoal, are big, meaty beasts, with a fine char, hot, crisped fat, and the rising scent of newly roasted spices. Lucky royal family. The online menu shows them to be £12.50 for two, which is good value for this quantity and quality of meat. I assume it was too much value, because at the restaurant these terrific chops are actually £16. There are a few examples of this, which a polite person would describe as unfortunate. The menu has been updated since my visit.
Boned chicken thighs are marinated in a saffron-flavoured cream before being charcoal grilled and are buttery and rich in all the right places. They are proof, if needed, that thigh wins out over breast every time. Potato and green chilli patties are sturdy rather than impressive. Flatbreads, stuffed with lentils and rice dumplings and a heavy dollop of yogurt and chutney, make up the numbers rather than thrill.
Of the mains the true star is the raan masala. A classic raan recipe calls for a leg of lamb to be roasted for at least six hours and for as much as a day, until it has all but fallen apart into its deep dark sauce, with the edge of that caramel which comes with the virtuous interaction of meat and heat. Here, it is offered on the bone, to which strands cling with little resolve. It’s a boisterous bit of overtly butch cookery. Come here for this.
If you can ignore the silliness of the silver leaf, there’s an equal heft to the cauliflower dish in its own dun-coloured sauce. Most importantly it has been timed perfectly. It could have been so much watery mush to be gummed away, but the cauliflower has tension and bite. Whole quail steamed in a stridently spiced gravy points up one of the issues with this kind of cookery. When a sauce is so multilayered and full on, the meat under it could be anything; quail is delicate and doesn’t quite stand up to this armed assault, but the dish is not an unwelcome presence. Dhruv Mittal announced himself previously with a restaurant in Soho called Dum Biryani which, unsurprisingly, focused on pots of baked, accessorised rice. Curiously it is the goat biryani here which is the least impressive or generous. It’s just a little dry and meagre. The meat is tough.
Still there is a luscious, albeit small serving of dal makhani for £7 with which to lubricate it. Finally, there are a couple of extremely sweet desserts, a carrot halwa and a milk cake with alphonso mango, to detain you, although not for very long. This is one of those moments where not only do I have to separate the impact of silver leaf from the underlying dish, but also my very pleasant night out from the cost of the experience.
Understand Lucknow 49 as a relaxed Indian restaurant in London’s Mayfair that will only occasionally knock your socks off, but will still show you a nice time along the way, and you won’t be disappointed. Bizarrely, in a complex London restaurant sector that’s sometimes tricky to navigate, it’s more of a recommendation than it might seem.
News bites
Maddox Street has long been home to a bunch of serious places to eat. They’re never cheap – this is London’s Mayfair, after all – but some are very good indeed. Among those is the original branch of Goodman, which is firmly in the premier division of steakhouses. There’s a strong choice of both breeds and cuts, all treated with due care and attention, as well as killer sides like the Josper grilled tomatoes and the truffle mash (goodmanrestaurants.com).
While we’re in the area I have to record my dismay at the closure of Mark Jarvis’s restaurant Stem, just around the corner from Maddox Street on Princes Street. It was that rare thing: a small bistro knocking out cracking food at a reasonable price. Jarvis has blamed the closure on building works in the area which have harmed business and says they may come up with another plan for the site. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Meanwhile, in Manchester, the soon-to-open Stock Exchange Hotel has announced that the food and beverage operation will be overseen by Tom Kerridge of the Hand and Flowers. “We’ll be bringing a bit of Marlow up to Manchester,” Kerridge said.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
