Green Spice

Green Spice

 We visited this, our last destination on our quest to review all Twickenham’s Indian restaurants, on a Wednesday evening. It happened that Wednesday night was the weekly special deal - a starter, a main, side dish and rice and bread for £9.95. We decided to give it a go and forego our normal pappadoms and main course for the special. The popularity of the special was evident when we arrived at the restaurant - there were many people there and as we had passed a number of empty Indian restaurants on our way there, it was obviously quite a draw.

 We were ushered into a back room because of the lack of room in the main body of the restaurant. Beer was bottled Cobra or Kingfisher at £4.95 for a 660ml a bottle. Full access to the menu was allowed save that king prawn dishes attracted a premium of £3. Our starters comprised prawn puri, sheek kebab, keema kebab,chicken puri - all of which were pretty good. Main courses were some time in coming, presumably because of the crush and again they were of a reasonable standard: chicken jalfrezi, king prawn patia, chicken dansak, chicken rezalla (a strange dish of chicken with minced meat and in my experience heavily laced with black pepper) and chicken lahore (with spinach).These were accompanied by cauliflower bhaji, niramish, bindi bhaji, dall and potatoes with spinach; various sorts of rice and the full range of breads - naan, roti and stuffed paratha - to supplement the dishes. Overall, quality was reasonable but the chicken dansak was distinctly odd and aside from the whole green chillies masquerading as green beans in the niramish we were impressed with the value for money of this offer.

 When the bill arrived we found that we had spent as much on beer as we had on food - 2 bottles each. The food was ample and probably too much in all honesty, so we couldn’t complain about the quality or quantity at the price. To top it off we were given brandies, After 8s and oranges on the house. If the service was slow it was because of the numbers of people there but the quite spacious separate room was nice as I find some Indian restaurants to be too cramped.

 Our scores overall were as follows:

 Price:          7.9

Service:      6.8

 Quality:       7.2

 Ambiance:  5.8

 Total:          27.7

27th March 2013

http://www.thegreenspice.co/

Moiduls Rawalpindi

Moiduls Rawalpindi

This was the first time that the reviewers had re-visited a restaurant which was subject to an earlier review. One reason related to the fact that the review was based on the views of  only two of us following a lunchtime visit and we felt that notwithstanding the good impression and the resulting positive review, it was necessary to try it out again in the evening. A secondary issue was that we could not agree on which of the two, as yet, un-reviewed restaurants should be tackled next – we all viewed that prospect with unrestrained horror!!

Moiduls was kitted out with posters on the walls announcing the recent award , quoting: “West London’s ‘curry master’ Moidul Hussain scooped Best South Asian Restaurant (London suburbs) at the prestigious 2012 Asian Curry Awards held last month.  His eponymous restaurant, Moidul’s in Teddington, took the prized top award, while the Twickenham branch, Moidul’s Rawalpindi, was highly commended.”  Our overall impression was that the restaurant lived up to this accolade. There was a number of other diners who were there before us – attesting the relative popularity of the restaurant on a cold night in the depths of January. This is in stark contrast to the sorry sight of many of our Indian restaurants in mid-week in a Twickenham under pressure from the recession. This meant that our food took longer than in many other establishments, which to us means that it is cooked freshly and is in line with our earlier lunchtime visit.

 

Our poppadams arrived, accompanied by a variety of pickles in addition to the usual onion chutney and the various other coconut, tamarind and yoghourt concoctions – an interesting and impressive array of condiments.

Our order was both adventurous and focused on firm favourites: lamb chop biriany (!) certainly new to us; Haas Tikka, described on the menu as ‘marinated duck fillets lightly spiced and cooked in the clay oven’,  making a pleasant change from the usual chicken; king prawn dansak and chicken dansak ; balti chicken tikka jalfrezi. Vegetable accompaniments were spinach, cauliflower bhaji, tarka dall, bindi and brinjal mixed, again new to us, kobi aloo. Interestingly they provided pilaw rice with the dansak dishes and were happy to replace the rice with roti for one of us. Overall, the quality of food was first rate and was surely freshly cooked. No complaints here on portions and quality.

Beer is our staple when eating curry and they have three types of Indian beers – Bangla (again new to us) draught Kingfisher and Cobra. The bottled beers were expensive in our view at £4.95 but the draught at £3.95 is not unreasonable. Overall, prices we thought were toppish but the service and ambience, including the ethnic music were good and far above the average quality. The waiters worked hard and were pleasant and deserved their tip despite the overall level prices.

Our scoring was as follows:

Price:              7

Service:          7.75

Quality:          8.5

Ambience:     7.5

Total:              30.75

23rd January 2013