Telephone: 020 7249 1340
Address: 56 Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16
There may be those who think that there are already quite enough Indian restaurants on Stoke Newington Church Street, north London. I am not among them. You could line the whole of the street with establishments from that country, and still have only a tithe of India's culinary treasures on show.
Having been content until recently with a general-purpose Indian cooking as purveyed by numberless and nameless Bangladeshi cooks up and down the country, rather belatedly we are beginning to appreciate the delights of a cooking culture that is made rich by religious and ethnic, as well as geographical, diversity. The cooking of southern India, and of Kerala in particular, is surfing along on popular acclaim at present, and it's not hard to see why. It's particularly well endowed with fish dishes, which we love. The spicing is subtle rather than turbo-charged, and there are regular tides of grossly indulgent coconut milk washing through or over everything.
However, even by the quirky standards of regional variants, the Syrian Christian traditions celebrated at the latest of Das Sreedharan's Rasa group, the small but delightfully pink Rasa Travancore, is pretty arcane. It seems that it dates back to when St Thomas stepped ashore on Kerala's sun-drenched, palm-fringed beach to bring the Word of the Lord in AD52. I can't help thinking that St Thomas had rather a cheery billet compared with, say, St Augustine, who came to convert the heathen Druids in our own rain-sodden land. However, we should be grateful for the culinary goodies that came about as a result, and for the pickles and chutneys in particular, for which the Syrian Christian of Travancore are famous (so the rubric informed me).
A quick glance at the menu of Rasa Travancore, and you soon get the impression that Syrian, Christian and Indian women rule the kitchens of Travancore with rods made of green chilli, turmeric and tomatoes. There's kozhy olthu curry, a Christmas speciality, it seems, of Sebastian's mum (whoever Sebastian may be); arachu vercha meen, from Ms Mariamma of Trivandrum; and the pine-apple cheera curry of Mrs Shusheela, a well-known cook in Travancore.
Although Sebastian's mum's kozhy olthu curry made it on to our short-list, I am not sure whether Franz, Isolde or I were swayed by the matrilineal recipe provenance, because we also ordered sagara rasam, palakkadan mutta fry, Kerala fish fry, chemeen masala, beetroot pachadi, not to mention some Malabar parathas, a helping of tamarind rice and but one pudding, kesari. If this seems rather a lot, it wasn't, although I couldn't quite come to terms with the tamarind rice, which, while being refreshingly sour, was a touch too soggy and solid for real pleasure.
It was the only duff note in a sequence of delights that ran the gamut from the agreeably solid (palakkadan mutta fry, which turns out to be hard-boiled eggs fried in a batter uplifted with curry leaves, coriander leaves and chilli) to the ethereal (Sebastian's mum's kozhy olthu curry: chicken dry-cooked with green chicken and coconut and then pepped up with chilli, turmeric and tomato) by way of the cheerfully delightful (beetroot pachadi, which involved swinging this underestimated vegetable into a different orbit, powered by turmeric, chilli, coconut milk and yoghurt).
On reflection, singling out specific dishes for particular attention is a bit misleading. Heaven knows whether any Syrian Christian of Travancore would have juxtaposed the dishes we chose, but each of them was finely characterised with a freshness and clarity that you don't always find in Indian cooking in Britain, so that the sum was as great as the parts. There were vivid contrasts, such as that between the sagara rasam, a rather opulent version of fish soup, and the great fragrant prawn, tomato and onion goo of chemeen masala, which had the unusual effect of making the prawns taste more of prawn than I have experienced in some time. There were delicate variations among the pickles and chutneys, which chimed like single notes one after the other. There was even school pudding heaven in the form of the kesari, made of semolina, mango, cashew nuts and raisins.
And at the end of all this I contemplated the bill with a fair degree of equanimity, not to say geniality. It was £65.50 all-in, or £42.35 if you want to discount the bottle of perfectly acceptable rosé, two Cobra beers and a large bottle of water - or £14 a head, as near as dammit. Now come on, that's a bargain for food of this quality and for the pleasure of feeling as if you were dining inside a bundle of candy floss.
· Open All week, dinner only, 6-11pm. Menus: Travancore feast, £20 a head. All major credit cards. Wheelchair access (no wheelchair WC).
