Townsend, Whitechapel

Choosing what to eat at Townsend at first seems like a completely impossible job. Not because the menu is too big or confusing or the dishes are unappealing - quite the opposite. It's a list of items so beautifully realised, so charmingly described and so starkly irresistable that even the token vegetarian options, such as they are, seem to beg to be eaten. I mean just take the top five lines:

Bread & butter
Pickled mussels and cockles
Bacon scones with goats curd and chives
Pheasant rillettes, pickled walnut
Fried Wensleydale, heather honey and smoked chilli

Nothing that isn't thoughtful, seasonal and delightful - and absolutely nothing you wouldn't want to order. In the end, using a selection method akin to pinning the menu to the wall and throwing darts at it blindfolded, we ended up first being presented with the bacon scones, topped with fluffy curd and sprinkled with chives. The soft, warm scone alongside the cooling curd made a great combination, and a great start.

Also from what I'm calling the 'snacks' section were these fritters of Wensleydale cheese, topped with an unbeatable combination of honey and chilli. Inside, they were gooey and salty, and way too easy to wolf down.

Following my usual compulsion to order offal whenever I see it, my own starter was curried sweetbreads - or rather sweetbread, it being one massive organ sliced in half, exposing a tender, bright-white interior. I loved everything about this dish, not just the main ingredient but the accompaniment of buttery burnt onions, cauliflower and yoghurt which added all kinds of interesting contrasts. Very clever stuff.

Potato dumplings - just dense enough to provide a bit of bite, but not enough to sit heavy on the stomach - came with a lovely seafood broth and topped with a scattering of brown shrimp. Like everything else, it was poised, considered and very tastefully done, a showcasing of seasonal British cooking in an accessible way. We were really enjoying ourselves by this point - can you tell?

And that was even before the arrival of one more thing guaranteed to bring a smile to my face - game. Pigeon, neatly filleted into two breast portions, skins dark and salty, flesh pink and juicy as it absolutely should be, on top of some nice crunchy leeks and one of those deep, rich restaurant-y sauces that probably took someone a day or two to make. The ease in which Townsend go about things, the extremely reasonable prices and the unpretentious presentations bely a genuinely profound knowledge of technique and mastery of flavours - this is serious food, albeit food that impresses with flavour and joy rather than expensive ingredients and unneccessary frills.

Oh almost forgot - we also ordered a plate of mince and onions, because why the hell wouldn't you. It arrived on a giant mound of mashed potato, "potato" in this case being shorthand for "potato-flavoured butter", an altogether more attractive proposition. Somehow, we managed to finish it.

Having feasted on six dishes between two people, I'm afraid we didn't have room for dessert, but I've every confidence their "spiced treacle and ginger cake" is worth ordering, and cheeses come from Neal's Yard so they'll be great too. Anyway, look, I'm sure you don't need any more details. Townsend is doing more or less everything right for a restaurant in 2020, and now they've opened up again post lockdown (at least "for now", the usual caveat in these uncertain times), you should hurry down to Whitechapel and make the most of it. God knows, you deserve it.

9/10

I was invited to Townsend all the way back in the Before Times, and didn't see a bill. Reckon with a bottle of wine the bill would have been something like £50pp, and we had a LOT of food

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

Mirch Masala, Whitechapel

Well, you could have knocked me down with a poppadum. For weeks, if not months, a friend of mine had been trying to persuade me to try Mirch Masala on Commercial Street, and of course I thought the very idea was insane. "Why on earth," I would say, "if I was going to eat anywhere in Whitechapel, would I go anywhere other than Tayyabs?". And given the sheer consistency and quality of the food there, I think you would agree I had a point. But more recently the buzz of recommendations for Mirch Masala had reached a even more deafening level as I learned a couple of colleagues at work at been and declared it (brace yourselves) "possibly" even better than Tayyabs. So that was that - on Friday evening I wandered down.


The menu was reassuringly Tayyabs-like in style, though perhaps slightly more extensive with a much larger vegetarian selection and some interesting Karahi options. We ordered a plate of sizzling lamb and chicken wing tikka, and on arrival you could immediately tell this was a kitchen with a supreme command of the grill. They were - and it almost pains me to say it - every bit as good as the grill from Tayyabs, succulent and salty and dripping with fantastic tandoori spicing.


The chilli naan was decent enough (nothing has yet beaten the garlic naan from Lahore over the road in my book, it's just a shame everything else there doesn't live up to it) but the Masala Bhindi was amazingly rich and meaty for a dish containing no meat, and the Karahi Chilli Chicken, despite containing slightly dry pieces of chicken, had such a wonderful tomatoey, herby sauce that I almost licked the bowl clean. Great stuff.

So, and here comes something I never thought I'd say, Mirch Masala may have done enough to replace Tayyabs as my curry house of choice in the East End. It's not just because of the food, either - although Mirch will certainly give them a run for their money. The problem is, thanks to people like me going on about how good Tayyabs is, it's more or less impossible to get in these days unless you turn up at 5:30pm or are willing to wait for two hours. And once you're in, securing a spot with enough room to use your elbows and not have people knocking you on the back of the head on the way to the toilets is yet another challenge. Mirch Masala serves tasty, cheap food (our feast for two came to £19 in total) in infinitely more relaxed (if rather canteen-y) surroundings and is a big enough restaurant that you don't have to sprint there after work to get a table. It has everything going for it. Let's just see how long it takes for the rest of the city to catch on... can you keep a secret?

8/10