Sharmilee, 71-73 Belgrave Road, Leicester LE4 6AS, (0116 266 8471). Starters £4.25- £5.95, mains £6.95-£12.95, desserts £1.50-£4, beers from £3.95
I can’t describe in detail how the upstairs dining room at Sharmilee in Leicester has changed since last I visited, but that’s not down to senility, not yet at least. After all, 26 years is quite a long time. The impressive young woman managing the restaurant today wasn’t even born when I came the first time. Back then, I wrote that it was decorated in calming shades of sandstone and noted a little decorative ironwork. Now the walls are a White Company shade of cream and there’s a mural of an Indian vista. It’s a comfortable, if functional, space. What matters is the extremely good value vegetarian Indian food, which I loved then and adore now.
There’s an enormous, volcano-shaped serving of crisp, crunchy chaat, interlaced with dribbles of tamarind and yoghurt, around a warm, flaky samosa. There’s a dark aubergine curry, with dimpled pools of spiced oil across the surface that coat the mouth, and another of new potatoes, in a thick, lightly sour, tomato-based masala. I mop away at all of this with buttery rags of still-warm dosa, which comes with various chutneys and a small metal pot of restorative vegetable and lentil soup. Finishing it all will be impossible, because today I am alone. A lot will come home with me to my family. Lucky family.
Sharmilee was the second restaurant I reviewed when I started writing this column in the spring of 1999 and it’s the only one of the first six that is still trading. The sports café Babe Ruth’s on London’s Finchley Road, the subject of my first review, is long gone and the small children who enjoyed going there for cheesecake may well now have children of their own. For this, my last column for the Observer, I have therefore returned to the very earliest place I could, to be a little reflective and annoyingly wistful.
Amusingly, at least to me, that second column began with me recounting how I had been lectured by friends that too many restaurant reviews by the national critics were of shiny new London ventures “where the bill for an evening’s fun can easily match the national debt of a small African country”. You will forgive me, I hope, if I don’t now mount a detailed defence of my last quarter century’s travels. My family knows just how much time I have spent on trains. Certainly reviewing Sharmilee, established by the Gosai family in 1973, felt to me back then like a declaration of intent: that good food can be found anywhere and at almost any price. Downstairs is a counter selling Indian savouries and rainbow-coloured sweets or mithai. Upstairs is the restaurant where, in 1999, starters were £2–£3 and mains rarely broke a fiver. Given that starters are now about a fiver, and mains rarely break £8, I don’t think the bill has quite kept pace with food price inflation. Like Bobby’s across the road, it’s a stalwart of Leicester’s Golden Mile, launched to serve the city’s Asian community, but welcoming to so many others.
It is unneeded proof of what a history of immigration to the UK has gifted us. We may not have the deep culinary culture of France, Italy or Spain. Instead, we’ve long had profound culinary breadth, by being open to the food of elsewhere. I have been lucky enough to travel the world by plate and bowl, from Afghanistan to Myanmar, from Bangladesh to Jamaica and all points in between, just by staying here. Long, intense essays, which are a little light on laughs, have been written about the importance of such restaurants as third spaces for these communities. All of this is doubtless true. I have read some of those essays and nodded sagely at the footnotes.
But it’s never been a zero-sum game in which the profound virtues of small, cheaper places negate the massive pleasures to be taken in the shinier and the more expensive. I love a quality amuse-bouche, me; something topped with a ludicrous dollop of sparkling fish roe. I love a pre-dessert involving, say, sea buckthorn, and a little advanced praline frottage. I love all the esoteric bits in between. The fact is, I have long been a wet-lipped, weak-kneed, unashamed chef groupie, here for all of it. I may have insisted a little defensively over the years that mine is a writing job, not an eating job. That is true. But to do the writing bit, I have had to hang out in all those restaurants, good and bad, weird and wonderful, cheap and less so. I have been blessed with good fortune and I’ve tried not to take that for granted. Underlying this column has been one grand principle: that there must be space in life for fun because otherwise, what’s the point? For me, fun is going to a restaurant. I really am easily pleased.
In the online age, which had not begun when I started, it has become obvious that some people find this whole business of people going to bloody restaurants and spending their bloody money on having a bloody nice time, an absolute outrage. How dare they? They have told me so vituperatively, below the line, via email and across social media. You do you, I suppose. The conversations with those readers with similar appetites to mine have, however, been so much more nourishing. You have shared with me your enthusiasms and recommendations, many of which I have followed. You have educated me, made me think and made me laugh, for which huge thanks. I could have done it without you, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as enjoyable. And I am, of course, indebted to the 1,300 or so restaurants I have reviewed, even the shockingly bad ones. You can learn a lot from a lousy night out.
That’s not to make light of how tough things are right now for hospitality, but I have always written from the point of view of the diner. Which is what I am today, here at Sharmilee in Leicester. It really is worth your time. They serve great thalis and on weekdays run a buffet for just £10.95 a head. Do note the £3 charge for anyone who wilfully takes more than they can finish, to guard against food waste. Soon I’ll start writing a new restaurant column elsewhere. For now, though, it’s time for me to lay down my knife and fork and call for the bill. Thank you so much for reading. It’s been an honour. But it’s time for me to go.
News bites
Amsterdam-based food-delivery business Just Eat is being sold to investment company Prosus for €4.1bn, in a deal which the acquiring company says provides ‘an opportunity to create a European tech champion’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Just Eat saw its share price surge during the pandemic, but it has been less successful since then. Prosus already has share-holdings in similar food-delivery companies based in Germany, China and India.
The London-based restaurant company behind Gymkhana, Sabor and Speedboat Bar, among others, has signed a lease on what will be its first permanent site in New York. Last year, it launched a temporary residency for the Persian-inspired Berenjak brand at an outpost of Soho House in Manhattan. The new venture will occupy the ground and lower ground floors of 1245 Broadway, which is already home to various media companies, including A24 Films. JKS have not said what will be installed on the site, though there is speculation that it may be a second branch of the Indian restaurant Gymkhana, which holds two Michelin stars in London (jksrestaurants.com).
Tom Kerridge has announced the line up of hospitality businesses taking part in his Pub in the Park festival at London’s Gunnersbury Park from 30 May to 1 June. They include Henry Harris’s Bouchon Racine, Alan Yau’s Duck and Rice, Indian food pub the Tamil Prince and gastropub the Bull and Last. Music will be supplied by the likes of Soul II Soul, Judge Jules and something called the Jay Rayner Sextet. And you thought you could get rid of me (pubintheparkuk.com).
Follow Jay Rayner on Instagram @jayrayner1
