A good curry (can be) hard to find

Harder to find a decent curry

A date! I put a shirt on. At the weekend. The weekend dress code, for me, is tracksuit trousers (with the optional additional mud after the Saturday walk with the dogs) and hoodie (with the optional additional spare food supplies ingrained after cooking the first meal). Stubble. Bed hair. Shuffle-inducing slippers. Constant cup of super-strong coffee, black, no sugar. In pop music song title (as in (What's so funny about) Love Peace and Understanding) or boxer's names (Iron Mike Tyson, Sugar Ray Leonard) I'd be (He's a right scruffy bastard, is that) Istvan Fallok, or Tatty Ivan. Breaking the dress code, it was shirt, jeans. Brogues. Not best bib and tucker, not suited nor booted, but compared to the norm, top hat and tails.

I've got a 50/50 record recently, in terms of getting decent curries, and, frankly, that isn't good enough. BLISS' was particularly disappointing, and that's more important than mine, because she's more discerning, and curry still represents the best vegetarian option, the widest choice if you don't eat meat.

It started well. We got the prime parking space, the only one for miles, right outside. Between the skip and a large 4x4. Nice table, attentive, efficient service. All good until the papadums arrived, soggy. The Tooting curry blog places extreme value on the quality of the papadums. Get them right, is their theory, and what follows is likely to be spot on, too. She sent them back. Rightly so. They changed them without any fuss, too. Ah! The conspiracy theorist pops up on the shoulder to say “if they swapped them almost instantly without any fuss, they must've known they were palming off old, soggy, stale papadums in the first place”. Batch two were better, still a long way from perfect, but good enough to shovel up some lime pickle, strong and salty, onion salad (not chopped properly – a red ink 'must try harder' / 'see me later' – something so simple getting it wrong is really unforgivable). A decent yoghurt dip, but too sweet for me, and too runny (milk, not yoghurt) and too yellow.

BLISS had sag paneer and garlic rice. The rice was good, the main absolutely floating in an artery-clogging sea of ghee. Too much even for my high oil-tolerance to consider reasonable. She asked for it to be madras strength. The bit I tried was nothing like it. A bland spinach and cheese purée floating in fat. The curry equivalent of baby food. My channa masala was pretty routine. It can be an amazing dish, done well. This was a mediocre dish, done adequately. I had a vegetable balti with too much onion, nice potatoes, and little else identifiable vegetable matter. Some carrot, peas, mushrooms, anything would've been nice, and I should've asked them to spice it up a bit, because it didn't taste of much at all, really. This is a curry house, and I have a right to expect some fresh chillies in a balti dish, don't I?

The chilli naan was good, though. Elastic, resistant to the bite, and liberally peppered with green chilli slices and coriander.

Luckily, the company was as good as it gets.

Either I'm becoming increasingly picky and jaded, or it's getting harder and harder to find a good restaurant in which to eat curry. I can't help wondering whether it's down to the increasing popularity, somehow. Apparently people actually like wine a couple of steps higher on the sweetness register than they admit to, and I imagine that no curry house ever went out of business because their food was too sweet and cloying.

Maybe it's me being spoiled by regularly working and visiting areas where the competition is incredibly intense, and where you can get a filling, satisfying and tasty dosa for under a fiver. Maybe it's time for a quantum leap in the preparation, presentation and policy of curry restaurants.

Overall, it wasn't that bad. A personal nadir was a MM birthday lunch where we ordered a selection of vegetable dishes that turned up as a selection of vegetables in an identical, bland, sweet, cloying sauce. That was just dispiriting, joyless food in nice dishes. The last Tooting café curry I had turned up in burnt-black pots, with missing handles, eaten from a selection of school-dinner plates from uncovered formica-topped tables, but had been prepared with some care and attention, and was delicious.