Tandoor Chop House, 8 Adelaide Street, London WC2N 4HZ (020 3096 0359). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £110
High up the wall at the Tandoor Chop House, just off London’s Strand, is a place where the newly installed wood panelling gives way to the original breeze blocks. This could be seen in one of two ways. It could be taken as a clever commentary on the way cities function; on how cultures merely build upon what has gone before, regardless of how ancient and venerable those cultures happen to be.
Alternatively it’s a pragmatic approach to the realities of the restaurant business: that in all likelihood this place, built around food cooked in tandoor ovens, will be gone in a couple of years, to be replaced by a Portuguese peri peri grill house or a Hawaiian tiki bar or whatever new trend Instagram deems suitably hot. Why slap plaster on a wall if it will only have to be chipped off later?
Being a cynical sod, I lean towards the latter explanation. It’s a conclusion aided by a little research on the company behind the Tandoor Chop House. It’s called Ennismore, which makes it sound like a grand Irish castle when it is, of course, the name adopted by an investment fund trying to sound venerable and solid. Sharan Pasricha founded Ennismore Capital as a vehicle for a failed bid to buy the Soho House group. Ennismore is also now the name of his hospitality development business.
It launched the artfully cool Hoxton Hotel group, which is now cloning itself across the world from Paris to Brooklyn. It also describes itself as being involved in various restaurant “concepts”. The word “concept” is very big with Ennismore. I imagine its offices are full of people thinking outside boxes and picking low-hanging fruit. It provided the backing for the street food taco truck Breddos, which enabled it to open a permanent restaurant in Clerkenwell. It is behind both the diner Hubbard and Bell, and Chicken Shop in Holborn. It launched the egg-based Eggbreak, made space in its hotel for the Holborn Grind coffee shop and a whole bunch of other things besides. While it does not use the term, it comes across as an incubator: launch a bunch of brands with the quiet suspicion that some may fail while others will thrive.
As a business strategy it makes a lot of sense. Whether it makes for good restaurants is another matter. I’m certainly not sure the Tandoor Chop House is a great advertisement for the approach. The problem is not the food, or at least not all of the food. Some of it is great. A couple of the dishes we tried made me want to bang my fists against the clubby dark panelling while shouting, “Why Lord, why?” – an impressive reaction to provoke from an atheist. The issue is one of positioning in the market. Indian food is obviously ripe for a classy mass-market makeover; a means by which to drag it away from the flock wallpaper and dismal sitars of suburban high streets. The problem is twofold. First Dishoom, a business I acknowledge I completely underestimated when it opened, has already done this. And secondly they’ve done it very well indeed. (Oh, their breakfast bacon naan.)
With this food there are also terms of reference. For example, if you’ve eaten at Tayyabs, the venerable Pakistani grill house in Whitechapel, where smoke belches and the waiters shout at you, it’s hard not to make comparisons. The seekh kebab of minced spiced lamb at the Tandoor Chop House is a more than passable example. It’s robustly spiced, and arrives laid on a well-blistered naan, under a drift of crisp green chilli and pomegranate seeds. But just one costs £5. At Tayyabs, each seekh kebab costs less than £2. And yes, Whitechapel is cheaper than The Strand, but still.
The same applies with the lamb chops. Here at the Chop House they have clearly been smeared and marinated within an inch of their lives, as they should be, and then cooked in fierce heat. But the chops have been rather politely trimmed down, reducing the opportunities to tear at bones with your teeth. And at £15 they are roughly twice the price of those at Tayyabs.
I’ll stop playing that game now, but you get the point. The best dish is the Dexter “dripping” keema naan, another charred flatbread piled with highly spiced minced beef. Black pepper chicken tikka brings sizable cuts of bird which have been shown a good time courtesy of the flames. Bone marrow naan is just an oil-slicked bread, which is not quite the lusciousness that was promised.
Other dishes are such misfires you can’t help but mutter, “What were they thinking?” Beer-battered and spiced squid and prawns have been cooked in oil that is just not hot enough, so the batter is fat-soaked and falling off the seafood, like a heavy overcoat being shed on a warm day. It’s like picking at the scraps at the bottom of a chip pan fryer while it’s still dripping back into the fat. A black dal is extremely loose and lacking in depth or layers of flavour. But the real achievement of the night is the tandoor broccoli, which tastes like it has been forced through flames powered by pure paraffin. It is acrid, bitter and dispiriting.
There are consolations, of the sort you do not find at the alcohol-free Tayyabs. There are jaunty cocktails, like the Punjabi Sour, an aromatic take on its whisky brethren. There is a wine list with some interesting choices at London prices. A sticky toffee pudding has that curious internal heat that suggests the use of blunt technology to warm it up. A honeycomb ice cream is much better, and pineapple takes well to being forced through the tandoor. The room has a pleasing buzz, and it’s fun to watch plumes of blue smoke belching fiercely from the tandoors in the glass-enclosed kitchen.
But at the end of the day, which is when I paid the not insubstantial bill, I was left with a question. I could see why you would go to the Tandoor Chop House once. It’s an appealing proposition. But having been there and worked my way through the menu, I simply couldn’t see why I’d go there again. And for any restaurant that’s a serious problem. For Ennismore, of course, this is less of an issue. I’m sure it has another concept up its sleeve. For behind all that wood panelling is a breeze block shell, just ready and waiting.
Jay’s news bites
The location for the Purple Poppadom, chef Anand George’s restaurant on the Cowbridge Road in Cardiff, may not be the most promising but the ambitious food is. He likes to riff on ingredients. So a plate of crab comes as soft shell, a fried crab cake and as a salad of claw meat. The Keralan -style biryani is a thing of true beauty (purplepoppadom.com).
Outrageous new product alert: Welsh tray bake company Gower Cottage Brownies has launched a range of brownie ‘butters’; essentially their extremely good brownies in spreadable or pourable form. As they put it, they evoke ‘memories of scraping out the cake mixing bowl as a child’. Available in original, chocolate orange or ‘blonde’ with white chocolate (gowercottagebrownies.co.uk).
Eataly, which runs vast Italian food courts/retail spaces around the world, is to open the first food-orientated theme park in September on a 20-acre site not far from Bologna in Italy. As well as 25 restaurants there will be a massive food market, virtual-reality experiences and production workshops.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
