Allan Brown reviews

Sunday, March 15, 2009 - Bhel Pappar is a squishy melange of crunchy gram flour straws, peanuts and various chutneys. Bhatura chana is a mountain of chickpeas with a side portion of inflated pitta like a breaded football. They’ll even do you a curry made from scrambled egg, studded with chilli shrapnel, if you ask nicely. All of this is made with pride and a flair for presentation, served in a bright, spacious faux-colonial setting. Balbir is a restaurateur firmly of the mainstream, but one keen to rescue his native cuisine from the shackles of ubiquity. Engaging and expertly thought through, the Tiffin Rooms is a welcome encore for one of India’s older songs.

Sunday, March 08, 2009 - It’s an ingenious doll’s house of a restaurant, petite but intricately engineered, formidably urban but with a charming informality that’s stoked by diners’ collective delight in being packed in like sardines…Seafood restaurants are normally quite dreary experiences, they’re raised-pinkie sorts of places, salted with an amphibious high-mindedness. Crabshakk, however, is a slap around the genre’s chops with an oversized haddock, a joint that’s as alert and lively as a gaffed salmon.

Sunday, February 08, 2009 - You’ll enjoy Thali. It’s novel and pleasantly daft; most meals are enhanced, I find, by placemats featuring a diagram explaining how best to eat the dinner, a kind of route map with your face as the destination. I suppose the crucial point is that the food itself is from the higher drawers of restaurant Indian food; well-made, consistent generally with its description on the menu and mercifully light on the ghee.