Koyal

This was my third visit to Koyal, whose kitchen is run by the gifted Nand Kishor. See my previous reviews for a little more on the background of the restaurant. 

Hara pyaaz, aloo and palak ke bhajiye is a dish of fritters made from potato, spinach and spring onion, served with a chutney made from peanuts and perilla seeds. These bhajias were lovely, crisp and without even a hint of greasiness, with excellent flavour and a well-balanced set of spices. It is genuinely impressive how a set of such humble ingredients can be made into something so delicious (16/20). 

Tandoori lamb chops (£11.50) were cooked pink in the tandoor, and were of generous size, having nicely absorbed the flavour of the spices from the marinade of yoghurt, chilli, lime, garam masala and jaggery. They were cooked over binchotan charcoal and tastes superb (easily 15/20). Chicken lollipops (£9.50) were a quartet of pieces of fried chicken served with coconut, chilli and garlic chutney. This was a tasty dish, though it was not quite in the league of the other starts (14/20). Black pepper stone bass tikka was a lovely as previous versions I have tasted, laced with roasted garlic and black peppers, and served with a cherry tomato salsa. The fish was beautifully tender, its natural flavour nicely enhanced by the pepper (16/20).

Kid goat keema was minced kid goat meat flavoured with fresh fenugreek leaves. This pungent fenugreek easily stood up to the flavour of the goat and this worked nicely as a dish (15/20). Takda dhal had yellow lentils cooked with spices, garlic, cumin, and a little red chilli pepper, and had good texture. This dish can often be quite watery but the version here had plenty of flavour (easily 14/20). Both garlic naan and paratha had excellent texture (15/20) and even a simple dish of pilau rice was unusually good, the grains of basmati rice distinct and fragrant.

I also should mention that I had a special pre-order for a very high-quality chicken, which was prepared in two ways. One was malai chicken tikka and the other charcoal-grilled with perilla seeds. The chicken was arguably the best chicken that money can buy, from Arnaud Tauzin in the Landes region in the south-west of France.  The birds are fed on maize grown on the Tauzin family farm plus some milk, and spend almost all of their time outdoors. The resulting meat has superb flavour, more so in my view even than the famous Bresse chicken. This flavour came though very well in the chicken tikka but even more so with the charcoal-grilled dish, which tasted fabulous. It doesn’t seem right to score a dish not on the menu from a review view point, but if I was to do so then the tikka would have been 17/20 and the binchotan-grilled dish would have been 18/20. I had always wondered what a really top-quality chicken would taste like in an Indian dish and now I know: it is a triumph. The high cost of this product (£27 a kilo at the time of writing compared to £5.25 a kilo for a bird from Tesco) makes it impractical for Koyal to put this on the menu, but it was a very interesting experiment.

For dessert, gulab jaman was very good, a pair of fried dumpling made from of milk solids and flour soaked in sugar syrup. These were not overly sweet as some versions can be (14/20). Coffee was from a company called Coffee Select and was not good. This is an area that could easily be improved by switching to a specialty coffee supplier. To give you a sense of how much this company Coffee Select care about their coffee, if you go to their web page at the moment and click on “coffee” then the following pop up appears: “This is a paragraph. Click on ‘Edit text’ or double click on the text box to start editing the content..”  Nothing says “we care” like not bothering to fill in your own website with some description of your product.  Doubtless, this will get fixed at some point but I have a screenshot of it.

Service today was excellent, and the bill came to £116 a head, but that was with two bottles of Viognier and the extra charge for the special-order Landes chicken, so that was much higher than a typical cost per person, which might be more like £60 or so. Koyal is a terrific restaurant that is really settling into its stride.

Further reviews: 06th Oct 2024