Another day, another curry – benefit of living in Tooting: you are surrounded on all sides by rarely less than interesting curry houses. On Friday night we checked out yet another one (whose name you must remind me to edit into this post tomorrow!): it was the best yet. Unlike a lot of the Tooting restaurants it didn’t claim a specific regional origin, and it didn’t have any particularly showy specialities ‘ in fact it looked outside and in like a completely typical suburban curry house. But it was marvellous ‘ the prawn puri in particular was the best I’ve had in years.
(Prawn puri is a good test food for a curry house because it’s a simple dish but there’s a lot of things that can go wrong ‘ puri too soggy or too crisp, prawns dicey, tomato overload, tomato barely cooked, sauce flavourless, sauce too strong, etc.)
I’m not great at describing food but this post isn’t about that. It’s about the dilemma our discovery has left us in. When you live in a place with an abundance of restaurants and you find a really good one, how often do you visit it? Do you stick or twist, so to speak? Back in Surrey this was hardly an issue: there are two excellent curry places in Reigate (Lal Akash and the Gurkha Kitchen), Isabel preferred Lal Akash so that’s where we mostly went. But all but a couple of the places we’ve been in Tooting have had one or two mouthwatering dishes I want to try again ‘ though none have been as all-round great as the new one. And then there are all the curry houses we haven’t been to. What to do, what to do…