Curry favour - Kappad

I can’t work out if I’m more loyal to my favourite places as I grow older, or if discovering new stuff just seems more exhausting. Take Indian food, for example. After diligently trying pretty much all the restaurants in town, I’ve finally decided when it comes to South Indian/Sri Lankan, my favourite remains Dosa Special (now into its third incarnation since I started visiting, but still with the same chef and the same peerless food). While for North Indian/Pakistani it’s Chutney, where I take all Antipodean exiles when they come to visit. They may have significantly better weather, but they still have significantly worse curry.

So it was with some trepidation I saw a new restaurant was opening on High Wycombe’s high street, offering Keralan coastal cuisine. Part of me was excited that the number of places in town offering thalis could now fill the fingers of one hand (if you’re in the Simpsons), but part of me felt that slight lurch of irrational irritation that my curiosity meant I’d feel obliged to at least try it out (probably several times), especially as I walk past twice daily. Even if it was only to discover it wasn’t up to the good old tried and tested. Yeah, I know, it’s a tough life.

My first visit was for lunch with work colleagues just before Christmas. All of us imbued by the heady charm of the festive lead-up where you take any excuse to trade the curled up sandwich at your desk for something a little more joyous - maybe involving a festive half…. Although this time I chose the strawberry juice over a bottle of Cobra, despite the latter already having a proved effect of increased joy. The juice was pretty cheery, though, and certainly made the afternoon a little easier.

At lunch, alongside the al la carte menu, they also offer a special curry of the day (meat or veg) or the Kaapad lunch, a platter with a variety of different curries, chutneys, rice and a dosa. For seven quid it would be pretty churlish to complain, even less so when everything was excellent - especially the coconut chicken curry and the fluffy basmati rice -  if a little delicately spiced for a masochist like me. 

My second visit was a post-Christmas lunch with the Ewing and Stealth. Normally a time for parsimony and restraint, we were soon ordering rounds of large bottles of Cobra. January looks so much better from the bottom of a glass. Especially if it’s had a cold beer in it.

Unsurprisingly our drinks also went very well with our selection of beer snacks – a variety of fried bits and pieces including plantain and ornate curls of spiced rice batter, served with a selection of chutneys and sauces. A step up from standing in your dressing gown, scooping lime pickle straight from the jar onto some slightly stale poppadums, which I may or may not have been known to do.

The prawn masala was good; decent prawns, served in a decent number (although there’s never really enough prawns in a prawn curry) with a decent, coconut garlic and ginger-flecked sauce. Hard to get too excited over; would happily eat again. Maybe not a ringing endorsement given I would happily eat most things again, as long as they hadn’t made an unfavourable future appearance or contain boiled eggs. Or both.

On ordering the ‘chicken stew’- chicken cooked in a creamy coconut sauce with carrot, beans, spiced with black pepper, ginger, cloves and curry leaves - the waiter asked if we wanted any chillies in it. Now I realise some people like their food without tears, but it also seemed slightly odd to have something, even with the extra chillies, so toothless on the menu.

It wasn’t that it was bad by any means, just that it was so delicate it seemed to lack any spice at all. Perhaps it's my jaded taste buds but it resembled the creamy filling of a pot pie, the kind of thing created on Food Network by a farmer’s wife from the mid-west, assisted by her brood of children while her ruddy-cheeked husband is out ploughing the fields. (pioneer woman! - TE).

Whatever appeal the kappayum meenum - fish curry with boiled tapioca - lacked on paper (an odd-sounding combination, with the latter addition bringing to mind lumpy school dinners), it made up for by being the dish of the day. The sauce was similar to the prawn curry, but worked even better with the chunks of white fish, while the tapioca was less like frogspawn and more like a root veg mash that had been infused with turmeric and mixed with grated coconut.

Alongside we ate appams, the spongy lentil pancake with a slightly sour taste which is good, but not as good as a paratha or a peshwari naan. And side dishes of okra (officially now my favourite veg to be served in an Indian style  - sorry saag - and rice tossed with lemon , curry leaves and chilli which was fragrant and fluffy in a way that my rice has never been, and probably never will. Still, a good excuse to keep getting takeout to avoid the inevitable disappointment.

While everybody knows that Indian deserts both simultaneously make your teeth ache and smell like the dish full of bits of dead flowers on your Nan’s sideboard, of course the Ewing still wanted to try one.

In fairness the pineapple kesari -  a syrup-soaked cake made of semolina, blended with fresh pineapple, cashew nuts and raisins served warm with vanilla ice cream - was really pretty tasty. Although Stealth was happy to stick with a liquid pudding.

While I'm not sure it quite scales the dizzy heights of my favourite spot, many may want to disagree with me and it already seems to have a fervent fan base of locals. Which is handy, as my fave only has four tables, and I want to make sure I can still get served. Kappad is certainly the slicker choice, if you're looking to impress, and also boasts both an alcohol licence and a loo. Quite useful if you've drunk as many beers as we did.

Super Saturday

Everyone who supports a team has their ‘golden’ era. For me, I would like to say it was the mighty Tottenham of the late 80s / early 90s, with players like Gary Mabbutt and Gary Lineker. Sadly, for me, I was a whisker too late and I ended up with Jason Dozzell and Jason Cundy. That said I was lucky enough that my first real Spurs memory was the 1991 FA cup semi-final, a 3-1 victory against our North London rivals which spawned the famous chant “we’re going to Wembley cos we beat the Arsenal”, something that I, endearingly naively, thought was a common garden occurrence. 

Of course, it wasn't; that is until last season, when White Hart Lane was finally put to the wrecking ball and Spurs were temporarily afforded the chance to call the hallowed Wembley turf  ‘home’ for the 2017/18 Premier League season.

Long story short, it’s how the Ewing and I came to be heading to Wembley on a Saturday afternoon to see what would, hopefully, be their first home league win of the season (and hoping that it wouldn’t be a repeat of our last visit, where we conceived to get knocked out of the Europa league and Alli got sent off while I was in the loo).

As with the time before (with a visit to, what now appears sadly defunct, Karhe Queen), we decided our pre-match prep would be in the form of a curry at the Sri Lankan/South Indian stalwart Palm Beach. Perhaps not the greatest choice before squeezing in close proximity with thousands of other people, but with the range of good, cheap Indian food available on the High Road, even I could happily forego a dirty pre-match burger from the van.

The menu is big - a meandering tome that spans across the two countries, taking in soups, dosa, noodles, tandoori, South Indian specialities, devilled dishes and biryani. Ever-prepared, I had already studied it extensively online, but if you're not as into pre-planning I'd recommend heading straight for the Palm Beach specials, where you can find Indo-chinese food and Sri Lankan dishes such as lamb intestines, anchovies, rabbit curry and the, Dutch-influenced, lamprais.

Football + Curry = lager and large bottles of icy cold Lion did a fine job of quenching thirsts and quelling fires. They also have the mighty Lion stout, an export style stout that young men  in plaid shirts would be raving over if it was being served in plastic half pint glasses in a corregated shed in Shacklewell.

If anything could get me to become veggie it’s Indian food - finding myself powerless when confronted by a creamy tarka daal or an earthy saag bhaji. I particularly enjoy their treatment of the aubergine, a tricky veg to nail properly. Here it's served ‘Jaffna-style’, cooked to tender collapse, languishing in a rich pool of smoky, spiced oil.

Of course, I couldn’t really commit to just veg as it would mean missing out on delights like the vast portion of tender squid that had been dry-fried in a dark spice paste rich with shrimp and tamarind and was impossibly delicious; all crispy and soft and sweet and fiery. A classic Sri Lankan dish that’s unprepossessing looks belie it’s delicious charms.

Another dish that would have had a pop-up in a Brixton boxpark by now, had it been a more ‘Grammable proposition, is the kothu roti. A dish so named because of the sound the knives make as they chop the ingredients on a hot plate, it’s a dish borne of ingenuity with roadside vendors using leftover bread from breakfast (or string hoppers or puttu), chopped up and fried with a mixture of meat vegetables and eggs. 

While not being classically good looking, it’s a dish with depth and charm; certainly worthy of a second date. Here the venison version was outstanding and utterly moreish - compelling me to keep eating to the point I pretty much had to roll myself out and back down the High Road.

Additionally, deliciously, yet entirely unnecessary was a fragrant Malabar prawn curry from the Keralan coast. A dish full of plump crustaceans in a rich and fragrant coconut gravy, spiced with curry leaves and red chilli, that was soaked up perfectly by with a bowl of old school fluffy pilau rice, flecked through with grains of luminous orange.

I've yet to make acquaintance with an Indian/Sri Lankan pudding I've really enjoyed, despite my greed-driven perseverance. Not wanting to admit defeat, and as the Ewing was ordering pistachio kulfi (no pic, very nice) and a cup of spiced masala chai, I decided to try the watalappan, or baked coconut custard.

Served on a banana leaf, this was a wobbly slice of cashew-topped joy. that tasted like the old fashioned baked bread pudding my next door neighbour made when i was growing up, only the familiar vanilla and brown sugar had been replaced by pandan and jaggery. An exceptionally good pud, by any standards.

Grinding out a 1-0 victory against the Cherries was hardly the stuff of my schoolgirl Wembley fantasies, but as someone who still remembers the joyful feeling of reaching the end of the season and finishing higher than mid-table and with a positive goal difference, I’ll happily take it.

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.