Wycombe Bites: Big Yellow Taxi

For a long time the only curries you could reliably get around my neck of the woods were the familiar North Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi itinerations. Your common garden tikkas and kormas and bhunas, served with bread baked in the tandoor and a side order of seekh kebabs and lamb chops. All very tasty stuff – my favourite curry house would always find room to squish you in, even once memorably on a busy Friday night, on a table that was halfway in the broom cupboard. Don’t worry, even with the complimentary fruity shots at the end of the meal there were still no Boris Becker-esque shenanigans.

While I would never turn down a lamb dhansak with a peshwari naan, I always missed having a Sri Lankan/South Indian nearby. The kind of place that swapped the flock wall paper and sitar music for Formica and the smell of frazzled curry leaves. Even if one particularly hot kingfish curry I had in Bournemouth made me go deaf for the evening.

Which is why I was so excited to find Wycombe had its own little café, tucked away on the wrong side of the tracks, where they served English breakfasts until lunchtime and then a selection of homemade fluffy idli, crisp dosa and uttapam, string hoppers and puttu, served in metal trays accompanied by fragrant mutton, prawn and chicken curries, coconut chutney and fiery sambal.

The first time I visited was early on a Sunday lunchtime in the depths of winter, where we ate mutton rolls and perfect masala dosa washed down with fluorescent bottles of Nelli Crush, the famous Sri Lankan gooseberry flavoured soft drink that's sweeter than Shirley Temple, covered in honey, aboard the Good Ship Lollipop.

I became obsessed. I couldn’t believe that there was somewhere so close and so cheap - more food than we could comfortably finish for little more than a fiver a head – that served such authentic, and delicious, food. Yes, it had it’s down sides, erratic opening hours, erratic availability of dishes, no loos, no license (we’d get around the last two by going to the pub first and stopping by the pub on the way back)  forgetting your order, giving you things you hadn’t ordered (spontaneity and the element of surprise is key here - TE) making the bill up as they had lost your order (thankfully, always to the customer’s advantage).

From the 'short eats' section of the menu, the Sri Lankan version of snacks and starters, the yoghurt vadai  - home made 'doughnuts' made with urad lentils, served with yogurt and herbs - were recommended. You could also have your vadai with sambal - a kind of vegetable curry, or just on their own. Confusingly they also served masala vadai, which are made with toor lentils and are shaped more like a flying saucer.

The chciken 65, a Sri Lankan classic, was also good, the deep-fried chunks of chicken, strewn with curry leaves and onion and served with lime wedges; as was the veggie version, made with cauliflower. And the chilli paneer, and the pepper mutton...(let's be frank, everything is good, better than good, it's delicious - TE)

In fact, it was all great, from the peerless mutton biryani, the paneer with spinach, the delicate rava dosa - made from semolina - and the outstanding kingfish curry, served with puttu - cylinders of steamed coconut rice, or string hoppers - steamed nests of fine rice noodles. 

It was also good to see some more unfamiliar items such as the Kotthu, whose name translates as 'chopped', the name deriving from the sound the large knives that are used to mix it make against the metal hotplate. It's a dish that's normally prepared at the roadside from leftover roti bread, eggs, vegetables and meat. Maybe not the best looking dish on the menu but delicious after a few beers. (EVERYTHING IS DELICIOUS AFTER A FEW BEERS - TE)

Of course, after a while the glitter wore off a little. My waistline started to rebel (even though I had to schlep across town for my fix), my wallet started to rebel (even at these prices, I was getting a pretty expensive habit) my digestion started to rebel (I even began to crave mashed potato over mutton biryani).

Weekly (or bi-weekly) visits became less frequent as complacency took hold. Although I still liked the feeling it was always there to satiate the need whenever the urge for insanely hot curries, washed down with insanely sweet drinks, took hold.

That was until one Friday evening in front of the TV, when I remarked to the Ewing that I quite fancied a dosa for brunch the following day. On opening a well-known online food delivery app, so I could plan my choice in anticipation of our visit (yes, I do frequently do this), I experienced a moment of blind panic as 'closed down' in foreboding red writing appeared next to their name.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone (very Joni Mitchell - TE)... I was immediately bereft. After a dark few minutes, where I thought about all the times I'd blown them out for a takeaway pizza or sweet and sour ribs washed down with a big bag of prawn crackers, I calmed down enough to think rationally and Google the address. They hadn't gone, just changed ownership and had a menu revamp and name change. Lentils, served in a multitude of different ways, were back on the menu. It was all going to be ok.

Well, better than ok, actually as the new menu features the rocket dosa, which is pretty much identical to the ordinary dosa, but just looks a lot more dramatic. It's an item that's often found on children's menus and makes a far better choice than Bernard Matthews turkey Jetters when it comes to aeronautical-shaped foodstuffs.

I was also pleased to see the kingfish curry with rice hoppers is still on the set menu, although the rice noodles are now pink, coming from being made from roasted red rice. On this occasion it was also served with a wonderful sweet and sour beetroot curry, that I've sadly never seen since. Maybe one to try at home with our allotment beetroots, that seem to spiral out of control each year.

I've never, yet managed to sample the squid, but the prawn curry, served above with spinach and coconut and cashew nut rice, is commendably generous with the crustacean and yours for six quid. I find the spinach (and sag paneer) here a little thin but the rice - not usually my favourite accompaniment - is always buttery and fluffy, which is far more than can be said for my efforts.

They also now do appams, which according to the menu are served on Wednesdays and Thursdays, but I wouldn't bet on it.... We managed to get lucky on an early dinner visit and enjoyed the plain appams served with a sambal  made with dried fish and chilles and the coconut hoppers, spread with a sweet coconut milk jam, that made a soothing pudding after all the salt and spice.

They also serve what I think has become my favourite weekend (read hangover) breakfast. Forget bacon sarnies (WHAAAT??? - TE) and McMuffins, the choly bhatura - with a can of Rubicon - is where it's at. The choly part is a chickpea curry while the bhatura is a puffy fried brad to soak it (and the alcohol) up with. The steamed idlis - shaped like little flying saucers - are also a great, but not as good as the chilli idlis which are chopped up and stir fried with lots of spices.

As usual when eating my dinner, I've saved the best for last. This is maybe not the best picture of a dish I have eaten almost every time I've been here, but the mutton curry with freshly made Keralan bread is my favourite dish that they serve. 

Here it's with the veechu roti, or handkerchief bread, so named because it's rolled very thin before being fried on a hot griddle. The normal parotta is slightly thicker, but still breaks apart in flaky buttery layers that soak up the fragrant gravy that is rich with the flavours of black pepper and fennel seeds. A must try dish.

So what's the moral of this story. Don't take things for granted?  Support local businesses? Eat more curry? Well, all of the above, really. And when it leads to night's like the one's above, it's a place I hope we don't lose.

Sambal Kitchen and Diner

A few weeks ago the Ewing and I were tasked with picking up a parcel from Gerrards Cross. Not wanting to schlep all the way over to ‘mini Hollywood’ – Wikipedia’s words, certainly not mine - for nothing, I was quick to seize the chance for an impromptu lunch stop en route.

The question was, where? As far as good eating goes, since leaving my first ever job (at legendary sandwich bar Mrs Crusty, the place I learnt how to battle with clingfilm and win) GX ‘village’ (it’s not) is depressingly bereft of anywhere I’d actively choose to patronise. This really is white sliced Middle Englander and ladies wot lunch territory.

Sure, there’s a branch of Malik’s – Heston’s favourite Cookham based curry house, and there’s Bawarchi, another Indian where we'd recently had a rather nice dinner. There’s also an offshoot of Beaconsfield bakers Jung’s, always good for a cake and a coffee; and I’ve been meaning to try the Three Oaks, yet another Cookham spin-off - although our meal at mother pub, the White Oak, was pretty average and pretty expensive.

After a bit of aimless Googling, I decided the best course of action was to carry on a few miles down the Western Avenue to South Harrow where, again according to my friend, Wikipedia, ‘shops on Northolt Road sell Sri Lankan and Polish groceries. There are five Halal butchers, nine public houses and four chicken shops.’ Beer and fried poultry, now that’s more like it.

Despite the leafy beech trees and chalk escarpments of my Chiltern home, I still love this neck of the woods. I was born less than two miles up the road and good old Grandad still happily lives round the corner in Pinner. I also love the contrast; as you dice with death dodging in and out of bus lanes, marvelling at tmyserious shops with names such as Shankar Superstore and Natraj Sweet Centre, a mere twenty minutes away au pairs pushing Bugaboos are competing for space at the duck pond on GX Common. South Harrow can still boast a bigger branch of Waitrose, though.

After an attempt to entice us into having our fortune read under the railway bridge (lord if it wasn’t for bad luck, you know I wouldn’t have no luck at all), we made it to Sambal Kitchen and Diner, a Sri Lankan restaurant complete with sister takeaway branch next door. 

We started off with some mutton rolls; good old Findus pancake-esque cylinders wrapped in fluorescent breadcrumbs and stuffed with spiced lamb, and served alongside a hot chilli dip and the obligatory sparse shreds of warm iceberg. The classic tubular snack, fresh from the fryer, to get things going.

We also had a dosa, one of the Ewing’s favourites. This time we tried the Jaffna dosa, two spongy, slightly sour, lentil pancakes served with coconut chutney and a thin vegetable sambar for dipping. Rather different from the more familiar masala dosa, a drier, more French crepe like version, but very good none the less. 

 

Drinks, which appeared about half way through our meal, were interesting. The Ewing had a fresh pineapple juice, while I had the Nelli crush, a lurid green, ultra sweet gooseberry flavoured cordial that was surprisingly refreshing when paired with all the heat and spice. This one came, unusually, with crunchy jelly like lumps, adding its own unique frogspawn-like texture. Mmm, crunchy frogspawn

My main was the devilled mutton curry with two buttery Veechu roti – the Sri Lankan version being far closer to Malay style flaky flatbread rather than the, relatively, parsimonious Indian kind. Served with a dish of simple creamy, nutty yellow daal and more fresh coconut chutney.

I love curries like this; the thin fiery gravy rich with the slightly acrid note of fried curry leaves and the dry chilli spicing fierce enough to thoroughly clear the sinuses. The bread was great, too, breaking apart in fluffy, ghee-soaked layers to be used to scoop up the sticky shreds of tender meat.

 

The Ewing went for the Pittu and fish curry, an interesting combo of pittu, a dish of steamed cylinders of ground rice layered with coconut, usually served for breakfast; a punchy Ceylon omelette (stuffed with fresh green chillies); coconut sambal; a vegetable paal curry and a king fish curry.

The Ewing was slightly apprehensive about the king fish curry. The last time she had ordered one, down at Dosa World in Bournemouth, it was so hot that she couldn't manage eat it, while the insane spiciness left me temporarily deaf and barely able to breath. The sweaty endorphin rush at the time was great, the day after not so much.

This was far tamer, but still with a decent kick, the meaty king fish standing up well to the rich, slightly smoky, sauce and the turrets of rice providing a nice bland counterpoint to the spice of the curry.

I was beaten when it came to desert, but the Ewing, unsurprisingly, wasn’t ready to admit defeat. Her choice was the falooda, a tooth-achingly sugary ice cream desert flavoured with heady rosewater syrup and studded throughout with chunks of fruit.

On arrival it smelt rather like a gathering of freshly powdered grandmas and looked like pink ectoplasm, so when she proclaimed it was nice I was happy just to take her word for it. Although, even she doubted the wisdom of attempting to finish the whole thing after the vast spread that had preceded it.

Twenty four quid later and we were happily heading back to the leafy ‘burbs to pick the package up, only to discover that it had been locked in a storage cupboard and the only key holder had gone home twenty minutes beforehand (long story). Proving it really was a falooda too far.