Gifto's Lahore Karahi, Southall

Having spontaneously decided that it had been too long since I'd travelled to far West London for dinner, and having picked an evening to put that right, the next step was to decide precisely where to eat. Various parties have, over the years, come to the conclusion that the Brilliant was the top of the charts in that part of town, but an unfortunately lacklustre meal in their sister restaurant recently in Fulham Broadway meant we didn't quite have the nerve to risk it. So instead, we found ourselves one fateful Friday night travelling (slowly, oh so slowly, thanks to the fact that Southall appears to be one continuous traffic jam) towards a very similarly well-regarded (according to an Eater list I read) Gifto's Lahore Karahi, occupying a large and brightly-lit chunk of the Uxbridge Road.

First impressions were good, thanks to a very friendly welcome by the staff and that all-important heavenly aroma of tandoor-grilled meats. It's a functional, rather than objectively attractive, dining space, as these places tend to be, but give me a wipe-clean surface, a laminated menu and the ability to order a Mixed Grill and that's more than enough to put me in the frame of mind to enjoy myself. With a mango lassi to provide liquid refreshment (they don't sell alcohol, and though a review in the Guardian from 2001 says they allow BYO, this is apparently no longer the case) we were very much looking forward to what followed.

It continued successfully enough at first. Pani puri came with a very generous measure of tamarind liquid and chick pea filling; too generous, really, for the only six pastry casings provided - we had to leave about half a cup full of each. But the flavours were great, the pastry was glistening straight out of the fryer, and these were really very enjoyable indeed.

Also good was something called Maash Dal, new to me but using split urid lentils (more like grains of Arborio rice than chickpea) and of a thicker, dryer consistency than the more common tarka dal. Very nice it was too, with a good complex spicing and buttery feel in the mouth, and something we'd both happily order again.

Next this absolute beauty of a naan, delicate and bubbly and crisp and slicked with ghee, a very fine example of its kind. You'd expect somewhere like this to produce a decent naan, perhaps, but it's never less than delightful when it happens.

But the mixed grill. Oh dear the mixed grill. At first glance it looked the part, not arriving with as much sizzle and smoke as you might expect perhaps, but colourful and piled high with the usual suspects of lamb chops, chicken tikka and seekh kebabs. But almost immediately we noticed something just felt wrong - a kind of sadness, a lack of life and love. The lamb chops were cold and dry, clearly having either been cooked a long time ago and kept warm or (even less forgiveably) reheated. Both chicken and lamb tikka were dry and mealy, presumably subjected to the same mistreatment, a nice rich spicing for each hardly improving matters, just making the whole thing more upsetting. Only the seekh kebabs were worth the effort, being moist and full of flavour and feeling very much like the only element cooked to order.

Had the starters and sides been a bit lacklustre but the mixed grill good, I think we would have felt a lot more positive about our visit to Gifto's. Yes, nice bubbly naans and fresh puri are lovely things to enjoy, but you don't come all this way (an hour from central London on trains and a bus) for nice sides - you need the main event to be worth the effort. And this really wasn't. It wasn't even cheap, £19.80 being about £5 more than the equivalent offering from Tayyabs. And I'm yet to notice Tayyabs reheating anything.

A day or so after the meal, under an Instagram post on That Naan, alongside a few people urging us to give the Brilliant another try there was a comment from a food writer who had been sampling various places in Southall for an upcoming article. They had noticed a drop in the standards in the restaurants of Southall over the past decade or so, and attributed it to (amongst other things) 2nd and 3rd generation Indians having little interest in working in the restaurant industry. Which I suppose is understandable - restaurant work is hard; often rewarding, but hard - but doesn't make it any less sad. Perhaps Southall's best years are behind it, and we will look back on the early 2000s as some kind of golden age of Punjabi cuisine in London. Or maybe I just need to try the Brilliant after all.

6/10

Tayyabs, Whitechapel

Two things are guaranteed to happen whenever I post about Tayyabs on social media. Firstly you get the usual fanboys, of which I count myself a very loyal member, who confess their undying love of seekh kebabs and lamb chops and chicken tikka, and can't wait to head back to Fieldgate St and try it all again. Secondly, without fail, there is another equally vocal group of Tayyabs skeptics, who claim variously that it's not as good as it used to be, it's too big, too noisy, the prices have gone up and "you should really try [Needoo/Lahore Kebab House/Mirch Masala/Insert Your Favourite Pakistani Grill House Here] who are definitely where it's at these days".

There's no denying Tayyabs has changed - a lot - over the years. What used to be a single room café set up in an old shop to serve the local Pakistani workers in the 1970s has expanded into four floors of noisy, frenetic restaurant, overhung with onion smoke from the skillets of mixed grills flying around the place, carried by a small army of smart waiters in black. Almost every table was taken on a wet Tuesday evening, families with toddlers, raucous work parties with their carrier bags full of beer from Tesco's down the road, and even the odd food blogger annoying his companion by taking photos of the food with his big camera.

But has the food offering really changed noticeably over the last few years, as some claim? Well, the first thing to note is that, like most restaurants - in fact like any restaurant that has its food made fresh by a changing brigade of chefs - variations will always occur in dishes, even ones that have been made hundreds of thousands of times by the same kitchen. For example, sometimes the seekh kebabs are more spicy sometimes less so; sometimes the lamb chops are a deep paprika red and sometimes a lighter yellow of yoghurt and garam masala. Sometimes the tinda masala is more buttery, sometimes it has more of a bitter (though never unpleasantly so) note of burned onions; sometimes the dry meat contains huge chunks of lamb bound with paste, other times it's something more approaching a standard, albeit dense, curry. These variations are why I love Tayyabs, and they're what keep me coming back, because there's always that chance a dish may be even better than the version you fell in love with all those years ago.

Take my most recent meal, for example. The seekh kebabs were sausagey and moist, not as spicy as they have been but full of flavour. Lamb chops were on the reddish end of the spectrum, densely flavoured and with the ribbons of fat along the bone as deliriously moreish as ever. And the chicken, glossy with tikka spice, were little bundles of joy.

But the tinda masala (pumpkin curry) neatly justified my faith in the place. Put simply, it was the best I've ever known it taste, and believe me I've eaten a lot of tinda masalas over the years. A deeply complex and satisfying paste of spiced butter, with notes of toasted seeds and caramelised onion, bound huge bulbs of pumpkin so tender they completely dissolved in the mouth, creating a dish that is, in its own way, completely unique in London and worth the trip to Whitechapel alone. It's also worth noting that although Tayyabs is Instagram-famous for its mixed grills, you could come here, order the tinda and veggie samosas and tadka daal and naan bread and have a very bloody good vegetarian (though not vegan - this stuff is ghee-tastic) dinner.

Look, I realise I'm not going to change anyone's mind about Tayyabs, and nor do I really want to - as one of the most consistently oversubscribed restaurants in the whole of London, with queues regularly snaking down the street on a Thursday and Friday evenings even despite the vast numbers of tables inside these days, they're certainly not desperate for the extra publicity and yes, as so many of you so bloody regularly point out, there are plenty of other places to get lamb chops in Whitechapel alone. But I don't care. You can keep your pretenders because I will remain a Tayyabs loyalist and for as long as I have a craving for lamb chops and dry meat, and I'm guessing that will be for a very long time to come. It's not perfect, but it's mine, and for introducing myself and so many others to the joys of Pakistani food, it is forever guaranteed a place in my restaurant hall of fame.

8/10

Lahori Masala, Shoreditch

The insurmountable dilemma facing any new Pakistani grill house - in fact, let's face it, the problem with most existing Pakistani grill houses - is the continued existence of Tayyabs. I'd be quite happy to visit Lahore Kebab or Mirch Masala or even the Maedah Grill far more often that I currently do, if it wasn't for the fact that Tayyabs quite simply makes everything, from the lamb chops to the Karahi Chicken, better than anywhere else. Sure it's a pain to get to and to get in, the smoke from the iron skillets burns your eyes and impregnates your clothes and you will be sat so close to fellow diners that you may as well be sharing the same plate, but there's a reason punters put up with such physical and emotional torment - it all fades into insignificance as soon as the first bite of dry meat passes your lips. Tayyabs is the benchmark for Pakistani grills, its consistently wonderful food and remarkably successful business model hanging over every other pretender in the capital. "If Tayyabs can do it, why can't you?"


So you have to feel for Lahori Masala, brand new on Commercial St on the site of an old wholesale cash & carry. You can't fault their ambition - this is a 600-cover restaurant. I'll say that again - six hundred covers. That's only slightly less than London's largest restaurant Gilgamesh which I think can cram in 800-odd. And the staff last night were lovely, attentive and friendly and obviously very proud of their gleaming new venture. But how would they compare? And more to the point, how could anywhere serving lamb chops and chicken tandoori pieces ever think they would not be compared to the granddaddy of them all on Fieldgate St? We decided not to ignore the elephant in the room, and in the interests of fairness ordered a selection of Tayyabs staples (lamb chops, seekh kebabs, dhal) and a couple of bowls of curry - a sag gosht and a bindi chicken.


First to arrive, though, were the popadums. All fried rather than Tayyabs' mix of fried and baked, and of the unspiced variety, they nevertheless went well with the fiery house pickles, particularly their home made tomato chilli sauce. I also think even Tayyabs could learn from the option of lime pickle - I love that stuff.



It's probably no shock to learn that the mains weren't as good as the Tayyabs' versions, but they really weren't that bad at all. Tayyabs has set the bar so high it's easy to get complacent at the otherwise pretty decent food being served elsewhere, and although the Lahori seekh kebabs and lamb chops were tamer, less confidently prepared (the kebabs in particular needed crisping up a bit more on the outside) and ran the risk of being a sad reminder of the Other Place, the fact is this stuff is all still fairly tasty. Also arriving with the starters was something Tayyabs doesn't do at all - tandoori chicken wings - and these were superb, crisply charred and powerfully marinated.


Mains were more mixed. Both the sag gosht and the bindi chicken ran the risk of collapsing under the weight of their own grease, but had a good flavour and perfectly fresh ingredients. The chicken cubes in particular were lovely and moist. The dahl was more disappointing, requiring far more seasoning to be anything approaching tasty. It was a bit like eating yellow wallpaper paste.


In the end, the biggest mark against Lahori Masala is that it's not Tayyabs, and I understand completely why you might prefer to keep walking down Commercial Road into Whitechapel. But really, we should consider ourselves lucky - I have a feeling that none of these other places would be anywhere near as good if it wasn't for Tayyabs. You need a market leader to shake up the system and show everyone else how it's done - look at the way Hawksmoor proved that there was such a thing as a world-class British steakhouse, or how Cay Tre made the wonder of cheap, authentic Vietnamese food available to Londoners. If the worst you can say about Lahori is that it's not Tayyabs, then really, that's not much of a criticism at all. I can almost recommend it - at least you won't have to queue.

6/10

Needoo Grill, Whitechapel

I don't have a problem with the ex-restaurant manager of Tayyabs setting up his own restaurant. I don't have a problem with the carbon-copy menu, the suspiciously familiar décor, tableware, table setting, water jugs, black-clad waiters, etc. etc.. What does irritate me, however, is its location. 90% of London is crying out for a decent Pakistani grill. Nobody outside of certain parts of Tooting or Southall can get their fix of seekh kebabs or dry meat, and Needoo Grill could have done a public service by bringing their mixed grills to Battersea or East Dulwich or Hampstead or Paddington. Instead, this Tayyabs-clone is parked literally around the corner from the mothership, on New Road - about 30 steps away. So now Whitechapel has Tayyabs, Needoo Grill, Lahore Kebab House AND Mirch Masala, and the rest of London can get stuffed and go to Masala Zone. Thanks very much, Needoo.

You can see their reasoning though. Tayyabs, despite the huge new basement room, is still vastly oversubscribed. I spotted a queue out of the door at 6pm last night, and even if Needoo existed purely as a kind of unofficial Tayyabs overflow, I'm sure it would still make a killing. But what Needoo does not have, so far at least, is any strong case for being destination number one instead of one-and-a-half. Let's begin at the beginning.


House popadums were served with the familiar "ooh wonder where I've seen those before?" array of dips, but had some pleasingly subtle variations. The yoghurt-y mint dip was particularly nice, sweet and fresh with a lovely vinegar kick. The popadums themselves were as you might expect, perfectly good, and only the vegetables were a bit disappointing, the cucumber being a bit old and dry.


The mixed grill certainly looked the part, and the seekh kebabs, at the very least, were as good as any I've tried, moist and lean and packing a decent chilli punch. But the chicken tikka pieces, though spiced perfectly well, were rather dry, and the lamb chops were not in the same league as the Other Place at all, being too sweet and sloppy and missing an extra layer of hot spices. I still wolfed it all down, of course, Tayyabs on a bad day being at least a thousand times better than most other ways to spend your food money in London, but you can clearly see the difference thirty-odd years experience can make.


Karahi chicken was also rather dispiriting - tiny, dry pieces of chicken in a relatively tasty but rather oily sauce - but it arrived with two of the loveliest roti I've ever had the pleasure to eat. Expertly cooked to split-second perfection, with a very healthy pattern of delicate browned bubbles on the surface, these were supremely light, bursting with flavour and with an extraordinary texture contrast between the brittle surface and the doughy insides. I may have issues with the protein at Needoos but someone definitely knows what they're doing in the bread department.



In conclusion, then, what we have here is a perfectly decent, friendly and convenient place to try after the queue for Tayyabs reaches the 45-minute mark, and I didn't begrudge at all one penny of the pathetic £8 or so my meal cost last night. There's a tendency, when faced with the embarrassment of riches that are the grill houses of Whitechapel, to compare one with the other and of course this is fine - a bit of healthy competition is probably why they're all so good in the first place. But it was while tucking into my lamb chops a thought struck me - if this had been served anywhere in London other than Whitechapel, and I didn't have anything better to compare it to, I would have declared it the finest culinary discovery of the decade. In the name of all that is good, and on behalf of the poor deprived residents of Battersea and elsewhere, can one of you lot please consider opening further afield? We're waiting for you, you know.

8/10