Dastaan, Leeds

Three down, one to go. My determination to visit all of the restaurants in this particular mini-chain - because, so far at least, they've all been that damn good - has now taken me to a northern suburb of Leeds and to the Dastaan there. My worry is that all of the things that made Black Salt and Koyal so remarkable also very much apply to their Leeds location, and so this post may end up being a bit, well, familiar. But a good restaurant deserves to be talked about, and indeed the fact that this team is able to run 4 (I assume... or at least 3) world-class spots at once is even more reason to shout it from the rooftops.

Dastaan Leeds is big and brightly lit, and on this particular cold Tuesday evening pretty quiet, although the room did begin to start filling up towards the end of the evening. It's a pleasant enough space - functional, slightly corporate - but your experience is lifted immediately thanks to the attention of the staff, who are so charming and welcoming and enthusiastic about everything that you feel like the only people in the room (even if you actually are).

Dinner began - naturally - with papadums and chutneys. Interestingly, there was one more kind of chutney than Koyal, and one fewer type of papadum, so we didn't get the Walkers Max-shaped crisps but did get a tomato and chilli chutney alongside the coriander and mango types. They were still all superb though, particularly the coriander which had a deep, rich, vegetal flavour.

Pani puri were just as powerfully flavoured as the puri at Koyal but the pastry casings were just a bit smaller, and therefore far more comfortable to eat. Like all the best versions of this dish, they explode in the mouth in a riot of spices and a blast of tamarind, one of the all-time great vegan dishes.

But just look at that lamb chop. Just look at it. Have you ever seen a more beautiful thing? The way the extremities are darkened and crunchy from the grill, the way it has that incredible tomato-soup colour from yoghurt and spices, the way you just know the center is soft and just-pink, expertly conceived and beautifully timed. Then, let me tell you, it tasted even better than it looked. This was a monumental achievement in chop-craft, an absolutely stunning bit of cooking that even had the edge on the excellent version at Koyal a couple of weeks previously. This may, in fact, be the best lamb chop I've ever eaten in my life.

The problem is, you get the very strong impression that you could just order anything at Dastaan and it would turn out to be great - narrowing our choices down to a sensible amount for two people was more of a case of deciding what we could definitely not live without. These are veggie samosas, grease-free and generously portioned, with another fantastic coriander-based chutney.

And this is a bowl of marvellously fragrant jackfruit biryani, studded with peas and topped with crisp caramelised onions. The vegan version doesn't come with the famous Gymkhana-style pastry lid to smash apart (my dining companion on this trip was a vegan) but has the same room-conquering aroma as it's brought to the table.

Finally, another contender for dish of the day, pork cheek vindaloo. The complex, vinegar-spiked sauce could have credibly made a paperback book edible but the meltingly tender chunks of pork served to lift it into the stratosphere - this was a genuinely breathtaking dish, quite an incredible thing.

But, sadly, there's only so much of the menu at Dastaan it's possible to eat in one go, and so we reluctantly finished up and paid, vowing to return next I was in town. The bill, with a couple of beers and 10% service came to just over £42pp, which considering the expertise on offer here (remember, these are ex-Gymkhana people serving 2-Michelin-star quality food) is one of the great dining bargains of the country.

So yes, just like Black Salt, and Koyal, Dastaan is absolutely bloody brilliant. I will be a bit mean and dock a point for the slightly soulless room but there's every chance when you visit it will be packed to the rafters - it certainly deserves to be. I can't imagine Indian food gets much better than this, but then I haven't yet been to Dastaan Epsom, so I have to consider the possibility it may do. Meantime, I'll have nothing but fond memories of this unassuming little place in the West Yorkshire suburbs, where life-changing Indian food costs less than a London-Leeds train ticket.

9/10

Koyal, Surbiton

I rarely make any journey without the promise of a nice meal. This applies to short breaks, long-haul holidays and day trips alike - I have no interest in beaches, ski slopes, cruise ships or campsites, and although I'm very partial to a long walk in the countryside when the weather allows, how much better is that long walk with a gastropub lunch at the end of it? Or at the start of it. Or at any point in-between, for that matter.

Plus there is just no point, in this country at least, relying on the weather to enjoy a day out because you have a very good chance of your plans being thwarted. No, what you need is a meal to look forward to because then even if it buckets down or blows a gale you only have to grin and bear it until it's time to eat. And then, of course, if the sun does come out, it's a nice little bonus and an excuse to have a digestif in a pub garden. I think maybe I just like pubs.

Koyal is in Surbiton, and is good enough to be worth a journey from just about anywhere but is particularly attractive for anyone who lives on the South West Trains Waterloo line (waves) and can get there in about 20 minutes flat. Their sister restaurant (or rather one of their sister restaurants), Dastaan, which opened in 2017, is a little more inaccessible by virtue of existing on some strange strip of nowheresville between Epsom and Ewell but has still, through the quality of its food offering, become a destination. I'm hoping - and very much expecting - that the same eventually happens to Koyal which was a bit quiet of a Saturday lunchtime, but as my friend pointed out, only weird food-obsessives like me go for a curry on a Saturday lunchtime. More fool them, I say.

So as the rain and the cold and the wind blew outside, we started - as you always should at high-end Indians - with a selection of papadoms and chutneys. The paps were delicate and grease-free (we particularly liked their little ridged Walkers Max-shaped crisps) and the chutneys - a smooth and tangy mango, and a deeply vegetal and gently chillified coriander - were both excellent.

Full marks to Koyal for the generous size of their pani puri, and bonus points for the flavour of them which brought in a beguiling range of flavours and textures from earthy, creamy potatoes to interesting tropical notes of pineapple and kiwi to buttery chickpea. But sometimes you can be too generous - the fist-size dimensions made them impossible to eat in the usual one dainty bite, and I don't know if you've ever tried to eat half a pastry casing filled with liquid but it tends to get quite messy. Great fun though, and as I say, impeccable otherwise.

Stone bass tikka is a dish - or variant thereof - that has appeared on many a high-end Indian restaurant menu in London over recent years, and whenever it is done well (tip: it's always done well, at least in my experience) becomes an absolute must-order. Unfortunately, this kind of advice is a bit useless at a restaurant like Koyal where more or less everything could be described as a must-order, so I'll just say that these bits of fish, brilliantly and boldly spiced, grilled delicately over coals and with crisped-up, gently fatty skin attached, were utterly perfect.

Lamb chops were similarly strikingly spiced and cleverly grilled, with just enough of the heat to give crunch but soft and yielding on the bite. And again, they were pretty much unimprovable. I know that some places go for a thicker cut on the chops so they can get a pink middle, but then those places also end up charging £20+ a chop, and sometimes you want to leave a bit of room for the rest of the menu.

What arrived next was one of those dishes that shoots straight into every single pleasure point of my brain and will stay there until the day I die. If Devon Crab Butter Garlic Masala sounds good on paper, then believe me, nothing will prepare you for the reality, a bowl of white crab meat bound with butter and spices that should in a sane world be too much - too rich, too powerfully flavoured, too heavy - and yet somehow conspires to be one of the great seafood dishes. I don't know how you'd even come up with a thing like this, never mind make it work, and yet here we are. The year it takes off your life with every scoop of the dill naan is worth it. It really is that good.

I could have left by now and died happy - a literal possibility after that butter crab - but there was one more glorious thing to enjoy. Wild boar in toddy vinegar showed the ex-Gymkhana chefs could still show a bit of game a good time, chunks of lovely soft slow-cooked meat in a spiced tomato sauce. With it, a neat bowl of saffron rice which we nearly managed to finish. I mean, come on, we did well, didn't we? Credit where credit's due.

Before I show you the bill, I do want to point out that the two of us managed to polish off a bottle of rather nice Viognier each (it was that kind of Saturday - we ended up in a tiki bar in Clapham Junction not long after) and so a more realistic price per person might be something like £70pp if you just had a beer each rather than the £112pp we conspired to rack up. But it's important to recognise that the wine list at Koyal starts at £30 a bottle, a very reasonable £8 a glass and on top of that they only ask for 10% service charge. The contrast with certain recent reviews could not be more stark.

So thank you, Koyal, for one of the best meals I can remember in many years. I enjoyed it so much in fact that I have booked Dastaan Leeds next month to coincide with a work trip up north, which I thoroughly expect to be just as stupidly good. Alongside Black Salt in Cheen (reviewed here back in 2022), also from the same team, and the aforementioned spot in Epsom/Ewell, it provides yet more evidence that London is perhaps the best place in the world for Indian food outside of India - and (whisper it), according to some people in the know, including India itself... but that's a discussion for another time. For now, just enjoy what we have, and enjoy it as much as you can. We really have never had it so good.

10/10

Vatavaran, Knightsbridge

It was Trishna in Marlebone, all the way back in something like 2009, that opened many Londoners' eyes - not least my own - to the possibilities of modern Indian fine dining. Now, I'm sure Vivek Singh (Cinnamon Club, 2001), Sriram Aylur (Quilon, 1999) and Cyrus Todiwala (Café Spice Namasté, 1995) will each have something to say about that, and clearly these places are just as much of a part of the journey of this cuisine (or rather, cuisines - India is a big country) as anything that has come since, but there was something about Trishna, the way it wore its fine dining credentials so lightly in favour of being so accessible and bright and fun - the effect was irresistible. I had more than one birthday party there, safe in the knowledge that there would be something on the menu for everyone, and everyone would have a fantastic time.

Head chef at Trisnha at the time was Rohit Ghai, a man who immediately jumped to the top of my good list for having a particular fondness for game. Tandoori pheasant, pigeon, grouse and guinea fowl all appeared over the years, both at the Gymkhana group, the wonderful Jamavar and at his later solo ventures Kutir and Manthan, and in all that time across all those venues I never had anything less than an excellent time. Especially in game season.

Vatavaran, barely a month old, already feels solid and settled in its swanky Knightsbridge location, and has clearly found an appreciative audience. As far as I can tell, every table in this sprawling three-floor restaurant was taken on a cold Monday night in December, quite an achievement for any other new venue but perhaps not quite as much of a surprise given the pedigree of the kitchen. Alongside a worryingly drinkable tequila-based cocktail "Sehar", involving tamarind, passion fruit and ginger, came the selection of baked and fried papads that have become such an important part (to me, at least) of the London Indian fine dining experience, alongside some intelligent house chutneys. We were particularly impressed with the gooseberry one which married the best of British winter produce with South Asian sensibilities.

Ghati masala prawns kicked off the meal proper and turned out to be lightly battered and deep fried (though still nicely plump and fresh inside) then topped with a mix of spices originally from Maharashtra in western India. They were, as you might expect, lovely, although in the interests of a bit of honest feedback we had in fact ordered - on advice from the chef, no less - the grilled wild prawns with chickpeas and curry leaf, from the 'Grills' section. Which I'm sure would have been very nice too. Still as I say, they're only a month old so a few service niggles are to be expected.

Guinea fowl Balchao (a Goan dish, this one - with Portuguese roots) came as a giant chop, slathered in beguiling spices and expertly touched by the chargrill. Again, there's that enthusiasm for the best British produce matched with perfectly-judged and intelligent, complex spicing, creating something entirely new and entirely brilliant.

There was one dish we didn't completely love, but even now I can't decide whether it was objectively not as good as the others or whether it wasn't quite what we expected. I think part of the problem is that when you advertise something in the 'Rotisserie' section of a menu, that tends to suggest a crisp skin, bronzed by dripping hot fat, encasing soft yielding flesh - textures a rotisserie setup does so well. This strange, shapeless seabass had a soft, flabby skin and a rather mushy flesh inside, and although you have to admire the skill and patience to bone an entire fish, I have to wonder whether just grilling the thing over coals might have produced a better result. Still, maybe I'm missing something.

The final courses, as is traditional in such places, arrived together alongside fluffy naans straight from the tandoor and a couple of tasteful sides. The main event, butter chicken, was a knockout - darker and richer than some examples, with giant chunks of expertly grilled poultry that still gave a crunch from a char under the superb sauce. Black daal was equally impressive, thick and buttery and moreish, and what I'm pretty sure was a courgette masala providing a nice light counterpoint to the other dishes but still packing a flavour punch.

So despite there being one or two things I wouldn't order next time (or rather, one thing I wouldn't order next time and one other thing I wouldn't let them order for me next time) I still left Vatavaran more than happy. It might not quite be up there with the flagships of the group like Kutir or Manthan, but then this is a slightly different operation aimed at a slightly different crowd - the difference, without putting too fine a point on it, between the post-Harrod's crowd and the post-Peter Jones'. I was shown round a very glam cocktail bar soon to open on the 3rd floor which will go down an absolute treat I'm sure - this is a place, as I say, that really knows its audience.

It's worth repeating just how much London owes the astonishing variety and quality of its high-end Indian food to all the names I've mentioned previously but from my perspective in particular, Rohit Ghai and the rest of the JKS group who transformed this naive food blogger's attitude on just how good Indian food could be with countless brilliant meals over the years. So consider this post as a protracted 'thank you' for the last 15 or so years, and here's to another brilliant 15 more. Oh, and bring on game season 2025.

7/10

I was invited to Vatavaran and didn't see a bill, but expect to pay £100/head with booze, pretty much bang on for this quality in this part of town.

Kachori, Elephant and Castle

There's a lot to be said about the redevelopment/regeneration/whitewashing (delete as applicable) of Elephant and Castle, and I am singularly unqualified to say it. I'm not trying to avoid the issue (honest), but am very aware that having nothing invested in the old place and being hardly a frequent visitor, I just don't know whether the old 60s shopping centre was worth saving or whether the new public spaces, footpaths, cycleways and - yes - fancy bars and restaurants are a net benefit to the community. All I will say is that they wanted to knock the Barbican down, too, in the 80s - and just look at it now.

Anyway it's hardly Kachori's fault that they are where they are. Like a number of interesting, independent businesses here and in Vauxhall they're taking advantage of artificially low rates while the residential properties above and around are on the market, until such a time they're all sold and Kachori and the like can be kicked out to make way for a branch of Zizzi's or Wagamama. At least, I'm assuming that's the plan.

But although it's very easy to be cynical about the area as a whole, the experience at Kachori is so utterly charming you can easily put aside worries about gentrification and the eviction of traditional communities while you nibble on your mini poppadums and house chutneys. The people involved are ex-Gymkhana which comes across very clearly in the DNA of the menu, and the quality of the food and drink offering - this is all brilliant stuff, at prices that reflect the ambition of the kitchen without being unreasonable.

Guinea fowl tikka is the second superb guinea fowl dish I have been lucky enough to try this month, the other being a classic French version at the Beehive in Berkshire. Maybe it's just very easy to make this bird sing, or maybe - and more likely - they were just two very good restaurants. Beneath a deep, rich spice mix was a wonderfully soft and moreish boned leg, with just the right level of fat and a gentle charring from the tandoor. Great stuff.

"Bikaneri raj Kachori" was a single giant puri filled with tamarind and yoghurt and bung beans, and scattered with pomegranete seeds and pea shoots. Breaking it apart into bitesize chunks proved a rather difficult - and messy - task, but we were rewarded with a lovely fresh starter full of crunch and colour, well worth the effort.

Lamb chops - I am duty-bound to order lamb chops in any Indian restaurant - were also pretty much perfect, with another deliriously good spice mix and a nice crunchy char from the grill. They also, crucially, had a bit of a bite - I don't mind the super-soft cut-with-a-spoon texture that some places offer, I just think I want my lamb to fight back a bit. Makes the whole experience a lot more fun.

"Lahshuni Jheenga" was a dish of three shell-on king prawns, crisped up on the grill but with a nice firm texture, served with a refreshing avocado raita thing. And OK yes, £20 is a lot to pay for three prawns, but they were good, and good seafood is never cheap.

Naans, as you might hope for an expect somewhere like this, were tip-top too, all bubbly and bouncy with a delicate pastry-like texture. They were very useful for mopping up the leftover sauce from an excellent butter chicken dish, which used thigh meat instead of the more usual breast for a more interesting bite.

Service - with the usual caveats applying about service on invites - didn't put a foot wrong, and managed to be attentive as well as enthusiastic about the food and drinks they were offering. It also, impressively, didn't slow down as the room filled up - as by the end of our dinner every single table in the room was taken. Not bad, really, for a new restaurant in a reshuffled part of town. Oh and this is a chai masala creme brulee with summer fruits, and a lovely little thing it was too.

So whether you let the Elephant in the room (or in this case, the room in the Elephant) steer your judgement or not, in the end, objectively, Kachori is a very good restaurant, and if I'm here to do only one job it's to report that. An ambitious, regional Indian menu from ex-Gymkhana was always going to impress, but we should never lose sight of the fact that just because they make it look easy, doesn't mean it's necessarily a done deal. I enjoyed Kachori very much, and I can see myself going back. Maybe I'm part of the problem.

8/10

I was invited to Kachori and didn't see a bill. Expect to pay about £70/head with cocktails and wine.

Black Salt, Sheen

For most restaurants, no matter how lofty their ambitions or discerning the clientele, sheer practical market forces will be the driving force behind at least one or two dishes, whether it's the chic Northern gastropub reluctantly offering fish and chips and a burger alongside their otherwise exquisitely tasteful offering of local game and foraged mushrooms, or the thrusting young modern Sichuan determined to introduce the timid local population to the delights of Old Woman Pock-Marked Beancurd and Man and Wife Offal Slices but can't make the numbers work without adding a few things like Chicken in Black Bean sauce to keep the regulars happy. It's not anyone's fault, it's just how the world works.

But what if I told you that there's a restaurant in Sheen, of all places, that has somehow hit upon a magic formula of serving something for everyone whilst keeping the standard of cooking so high across the board that you can essentially throw a round of darts at the menu from 8ft and still end up with the meal of your life? Where all ingredients, plant or animal, are treated with intelligence and respect they deserve and not a single thing is anything less than essential, never mind tasty?

Now, I have not - yet - tried everything that Black Salt have to offer, but I feel confident in saying you can't go wrong here partly on the basis that when I have asked fans of the place (of which there are many) which are the must-order items, everyone came back with something different, and also because the 8 or 9 items we did order were largely perfect. Starting with this selection of poppadums, so delicate and light that they almost dissolved in the mouth, and three chutneys, all made fresh in-house, from a superb fresh lime pickle to a gorgeously rich and intriguing mango without a hint of that cloying sweetness you get in the mass produced stuff.

As I've said (and I'm likely to say again), not much at Black Salt was less than perfect, but the really astonishing achievement of the place is to elevate the most unlikely and unassuming ingredients - in this case beetroot - to such a level that every dish could call itself a must-order. Inside a beautifully delicate and grease-free breadcrumb casing was a soft, beguilingly spiced filling of beetroot mixture, as rich and rewarding as anything that's ever come out of a fryer. Beside it a neat little squiggle of summer berry chutney, which was just as remarkable in a different way, the kind of clever fruit/savoury sauce that you'd expect from the very finest of fine dining kitchens.

Mixed bhajiya, similarly, got everything right, from the almost honeycomb-fragile texture of the fried vegetables (a balanced mix of kale, spinach, potato and onion, no one element dominating) to the vegetal loveliness of the mint chutney. They really do seem to be masters of texture at Black Salt - the way the fried dishes dance around the mouth is quite something.

Channa papdi chaat had an even more addictive set of textures, from the chunky potato and chickpeas underneath to the crisp of the sev sprinkled on top, through the ribbons of tamarind, coriander and chilli chutneys that bound it all together. There's something extremely satisfying about a dish that cools with yoghurt at the same time as hitting with a punch of chilli, it's a fantastic medley of effects.

You'll notice that we haven't had any meat or seafood yet - don't worry that will come - but it's worth repeating that you really can't go wrong at Black Salt with any dish, and that includes anything marked with a (V) or even, in the case of the beetroot fritter and papads, (VE). Even what would in lesser hands be a throwaway side of spinach boasted a healthy punch of garlic and yet another masterful mix of spices.

But yes, we did order some protein. This is 'best end' lamb chop, and if you're unsure what 'best end' means with regards to lamb, well so was I but I can only assume it means 'ludicrously tender and brilliantly cooked', as that's how it arrived. It had clearly been close to some hot coals, as the odd bit of charring on the bone and edges proved, but the meat was so yielding it felt almost reconstituted, like some kind of Heston Blumenthal experimental lamb made of lamb. Ok, that doesn't make them sound amazing does it, but they honestly were.

Prawns were also - here's that word again - perfect. Cooked to sweetly tender, in a garlic-chilli-tomato sauce that presented the seafood well without dominating, they had more of that delicate charring from the coals and a lovely firm-but-not-chewy bite. Oh and the garlic and tomato chutney they came with was pretty special, too.

If there's one aspect of the offering at Black Salt that's less than stellar, it's perhaps the bread. Having been told the naans were nothing better than OK, we had decided to go for a round of paratha instead. Unfortunately, rather than the delicate folds of swirly pastry we were expecting (and had, unfortunately for Black Salt, been treated to at Hawker's Kitchen in King's Cross a week or so earlier) these were little better than plain flatbreads, stodgy and uninteresting and not very paratha-y at all.

But who cares, because all we really needed was a vehicle to scoop up mouthfuls of their dense, buttery dal makhani, and that was a job even faintly uninteresting paratha could live up to. In fact, perhaps a more pastry-like paratha would have been too rich matched with the dal. Maybe they know what they're doing after all.

Most wines were around the £30 mark, in fact I think there could have been one even cheaper, which is pretty commendable for a London restaurant in 2022. In fact, all the above astonishing food, most of which easily matches the best out of the kitchens at Michelin starred places in Mayfair and Chelsea, came to £34pp, still just under £40 each even with service added on which they didn't even ask for. And much as I love Jamavar, and Kutir and the like, and appreciate that rents in Sheen will not be in the same category as Zone 1, it does beg the question, if you can eat this well for £40pp, why would you ever bother eating anywhere else?

The answer to that hypothetical question, perhaps, comes in the form of a little place in Ewell called Dastaan, sister restaurant to Black Salt, and which is spoken of in hushed tones to those lucky enough to have visited both, as "even better". And if this seems impossible given what you've just read, well I agree, but I am determined to discover the truth for myself as soon as is realistically possible. In the meantime, I will have my memories of Black Salt to love and relive, an unassuming and comfortable little spot on Upper Richmond Road serving some of the best Indian food in the entire country.

9/10