Review: Koyal, Surbiton

Koyal is the third branch of the Dastaan empire. Unlike their Leeds restaurant, this time they’ve opened just a couple of miles up the road in Surbiton. It should make a big difference though: Dastaan is on a suburban shopping parade miles from the nearest train station, meaning anyone from central London has quite the trek to get there by train & taxi. Koyal is just five minutes walk from Surbiton station down the line from Waterloo.

The dining room is colourful and simple. I don’t think any slick design company has been drafted in here to “develop an aesthetic”. But it’s a comfortable dining room and service is friendly throughout. The food is more than friendly, unsurprising as it is very familiar from Dastaan – no bad thing, as it’s still the best mid-range Indian cooking I’ve eaten anywhere, by a mile.

We start with pani puri, as tradition dictates. They create consistently superb crunchy shells that never leak, the filling is tangy and the sauce is a brightly bitter-herbal kick. Our other starter is a new one, sweet potato chaat. This is brilliant, all the usual ingredients of crunchy sev, cool yogurt and tangy sauce for a classic chaat but based around cubes of sweet potato that are chewy on the inside and crispy outside. All gone very quickly.

For main we went with the muntjac biriyani. A very good biriyani hidden under the dome of brown seed-crusted pastry, plenty of soft, dense, dark muntjac meat amidst the fragrant rice. I have to admit, though, that our friends’ bhangjeera chicken curry was the dish of the evening, a fiery hot gravy with a melange of spices I’m never going to be able to pick apart. Bhangjeera in particular is the highly fragrant perilla seed, roasted and ground as a spice. So now I know.

Sides of dal maharani with rich black lentils, and spinach cooked down with garlic and mushrooms, were both excellent as usual. Their wholewheat paratha is a wonder, flakey and soft with only a little butteryness, nutty flavoured from the wholewheat. We were given a complimentary pistachio kulfi afterwards; very good pistachio flavour, but for me it was more like hardened condensed milk than an icecream, just not to my taste.

We went with cocktails and then lassis to drink, and their house cocktails really show off their obvious know-how with spices. I recommend black cardamom and vanilla lassi, but perhaps the mango one was even better. You’ll probably pay up to £30 each without drinks for a meal at Koyal, and this is superb value for the sheer quality of everything. The team from Dastaan can roll this menu out right across the country and I’d be very happy!