Can I write a fair review here? We met up at Cinnamon Bazaar with friends, six of us for a sociable dinner a few weeks before Christmas (though close enough for all the decorations to be up in the streets and the festive menus to be popping up in the restaurants). So perhaps my mind was more on conversation than food. And yet. And yet that’s kinda telling in its own way. I love food. If there had been anything much to love here, I’d have noticed it. And we’d have talked about it, given everyone at the table rather likes good food as much as me. So the lack of “oh wow, have you tried this?” was telling.
The dining room is a bustling place, packed with serried ranks of tables to make maximum use of the space. After all, this is a popular dining area of London and “modern Indian” is a very popular style. Just ask the queues outside Dishoom. Service was fine throughout the meal, effective rather than particularly friendly.
Shepherd’s pie
And we chomped our way through a bunch of inoffensive modern Indian dishes. My pineapple salad, more snack than starter, didn’t have enough spicy oomph to tackle the sweet juice of the pineapple. Maureen’s fish fry was tasty enough. Tim’s stuffed pan-bread was street-foodie enough that it actually felt a bit out of place in a restaurant setting. For main I went with the shepherd’s pie, which for some reason is on Time Out’s Top 100 Dishes in London list. I’ve no idea how that list was compiled, but this was just a nice shepherd’s pie. There were pieces of soft and flavoursome lamb amongst the gently spiced mince and the saffron-coloured mash had some good saffrony flavour, but the right adjective for the whole was just “nice”. The Xacuti chicken curry was better, a rich curry gravy with south Indian spices, but not something I’d be amazed to find at a good curry house in any small town in England.
One of the surprises of this meal was that we all had room for dessert! I can’t remember the last time I had an Indian meal, even Michelin-aspirant fine dining Indian, and not felt stuffed by the time dessert rolled up. But this time I had no trouble scoffing a very pleasant rice pudding with pineapple sorbet.
At around £35 each before drinks, it has to be said that Cinnamon Bazaar is decent value for its central location in town. But I’d be willing to pay a few quid extra to have my socks blown off with some really inventive Indian street-food inspired cooking, rather than munch my way through this perfectly pleasing but average fare.
