185a Cowbridge Road East, Cardiff (029 2022 0026). Meal for two: £100
I have seen less promising locations for ambitious restaurants, but not many. The first thing I spot is not the doorway to Cardiff's Purple Poppadom, in the endearingly scuffed Canton district of the city, but the shuttered entrance to Sizzle and Grill, which describes itself as the British "Home of Man v Food". This ain't selling it to me. Man v Food is a foul American TV show in which a bloke called Adam Richman wanders about the US eating burgers the size of his head and saying "Wow" a lot, as if it were insightful. Which, in his case it just may be, his vocabulary not getting far beyond that.
Sizzle and Grill, which has a terrifying number of menus, likes to celebrate the show. Hence one of those menus includes challenges like the 69oz mixed grill for £34.95. (Eat it all within one hour and you get it for free.) There's the Baby Burger, so called because it weighs as much as one, and the Wing King Challenge, which involves eating 75 in 30 minutes. Look, I'm all for greed, but I do think it's much like masturbation. It's not something for public consumption and you shouldn't be able to win prizes for it, however much enthusiasm you display.
The point being that Sizzle and Grill – Oi! Stop Googling it! – is a distraction. Ignore it. Move on. Nothing to see here. It just happens to be located beneath chef Anand George's Indian restaurant. Through the discreet doorway, up the stairs and you are in a wide space with clean, blond-wood panelling and a few bursts of saturated colour on the walls which, despite their brightness, somehow don't make you want to recoil. It's a smart space for what George describes as his "Nouvelle" Indian food. That word, and some of the menu language, is, I grant you, very worrying.
The menu changes with the seasons. The current winter offering contains things like Lapin à Deux, presumably because "rabbit two ways" just isn't trying hard enough. There's Oxtail Odyssey Duo and Scallops Chou-Fleur – which does sound prettier than cauliflower, but is still a bit silly. Try to ignore all this. Take it merely as a statement of intent; that he has ambitions to do more than just serve dun-coloured stews or be constrained by standard repertoire. The language may be on the pretentious side. The cooking really isn't.
A few weeks back, in a review of the marvellous but pricey Mayfair Indian restaurant Gymkhana, I argued that just because food from that part of the world was often sold very cheaply, that didn't mean it all had to be. If French, Italian and Japanese cooking can be expensive so can food from the Indian subcontinent, as long as the quality justifies the cost. Online, an enormous number of people spat out their dummies.
They didn't come up with a counterargument so much as bang the keyboards with their fists. They merely said food from there should be cheap (while also often saying all restaurant food should be cheap). It's hard to argue with people who are trying to win medals at missing the point, so I won't bother – save to say the Purple Poppadom, while not Gymkhana-expensive, also isn't cheap compared to your usual high-street curry house. Then again it isn't a high-street curry house. Starters are around £7, with mains in the teens. If you don't like this, the solution is simple: don't go.
George likes serving his food in partworks. So a crab starter brings a perfectly fried soft-shell crab in the middle of the plate, with a batter carefully hinged between salt and spice. There is a crisp crab croquette and then, at the other end of the plate, a warm tian of crab and sweetcorn, with a gentle heat of both temperature and spice that gives the whole thing a sweet, funky glow.
A non-meat assemblage, influenced by the street food of Mumbai, has a crisp domed puri backfilled with yogurt and chutney to be popped into the mouth in one go so the sauce doesn't dribble down your chin when you bite in. Alongside it is a warm potato cake on a disc of spiced chickpeas and a salad of puffed rice with a sharp tamarind dressing.
Best of all is a pokey duck stew, apparently after a Syrian recipe: a shadow-dark meaty, savoury something, surrounded by a cooling and blindingly white coconut cream sauce with soft rice dumplings. This is food that conversation stops over.
The problem with serving things in threes is that inevitably one becomes the star. So it is with a main course of venison. A punchy curry sealed in a pot by a golden puff pastry top and a venison burger are completely overshadowed by a marinated piece of haunch roasted in the tandoor. The best roasting makes meat taste more of itself. That's what happens here. An Anglo-Indian pork roast brings thick slices of long-cooked pork belly with more of an assumed Asian accent than a real Indian kick. But it was still pork belly and I'm never going to kick a bit of that out of bed.
Of the more basic stews the best is of chicken, cooked on the bone, with burnt garlic. There is nothing acrid here – just a soft, warm pungency. By comparison, a Kashmiri rogan josh of lamb is a little one-note. A yellow dal tadka, thick with garlic and cumin, is a deep, warming lubricant that keeps everything else moving.
Indian desserts tend, for the most part, to be a victory of sugar syrup over good taste. They don't so much drizzle the stuff as hose plates down with it. Here they attempt something else. The sweet, crisp samosa, with a filling of almost liquefied dark chocolate, may not be original but it's bloody good. A crème brûlée flavoured with rose petals surprises me for being light and fragrant rather than tasting like the perfume counter at Debenhams.
From a list that stays almost entirely the right side of £30 we drink an Indian sauvignon blanc from Sula Vineyards, mostly because we can – few places offer Indian wines. It's light and bright, with soft edges, and does the job very nicely indeed. We finish almost everything. No sirens sound. We do not win prizes. This is because we ordered what we wanted to eat, dinner not being a competition. Clearly, when choosing where to go for dinner, we went through the right Cardiff doorway.
Jay's news bites
■ Vineet Bhatia was one of the first chefs from India working in Britain – at Zaika in Kensington - to demonstrate that his homeland's food could be much more than just brown stews. Now he's cooking at Rasoi Vineet Bhatia, located in a smart Chelsea townhouse. Go there for his glorious home-smoked tandoor salmon and for the original chocolate samosa. It isn't cheap, but it is good (rasoi-uk.com).
■ If there's one thing New York knows how to do, it's burgers and lobsters. So let's celebrate the self-confidence of the Goodman steakhouse group, which is to open a branch of its Burger & Lobster chain in Manhattan.
In London the five-strong chain serves either a burger or a lobster, charging £20 for the over-priced burger or the underpriced lobster. In New York it
will be a snip at $20 (burgerandlobster.com).
■ Great Scotland Yard, the original home of the Metropolitan Police, is to be turned into a five-star hotel. The private dining rooms will be in the cells and interrogation units used for prisoners during the First and Second World Wars.
