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/
