Tooting curry
A drive up to Tooting with MM, and a
curry with MM, Kiz and H. There's no choice, as I see it, other than
to eat curry when there's so much choice. We went to the one at the
end of the road, keeping things simple. A long wait, which I always
take as a good sign, and then the sizzling pots arrived, with a
basket of bread.
I had a potato curry, chickpea curry,
and a chilli naan, and scoffed every last scrap, because it was all
absolutely spot-on. Any restaurant can be hit and miss, any given
night, but there wasn't much left on the table when we'd finished.
The place feels open. It's on the
corner, the external walls are shopfront glazing. There are simple
wooden tables seating two or four people. The place is busy.
Commuters call in on their way home for takeaways. There's a counter
with keep-warm trays, behind which staff bustle, spooning curry and
rice into containers, cooking the skewered meats, making up the kebab
rolls, slapping dough onto the sides of the tandoor. Some punters
brought their own beer and wine, but it does not have a licence. The
waiter brought menus: laminated A4 sheets, plates, cutlery, and took
our drinks order, then left us alone until the food arrived. The
telly in the corner is tuned to cricket, if there is any, football if
there isn't, and what looked like some random birdwatching channel if
there's neither.
There's an upstairs overspill seating
area, but on Wednesday night it was busy, but not that busy.
I managed to save enough bread to mop
the plate, and both black metal pots, scooping up every last drop of
those sauces. The Bombay aloo was hot enough, the potatoes just
right, intact but soft enough to have absorbed the spicy flavours.
The chickpeas were resistant to the bite, in a rich, dark brown sauce
flecked with fresh coriander, and heavy on the garlic. The last
online cook curry at home like the restaurants serve up advice said
don't skimp: don't skimp on the oil, it doesn't need to be swimming,
but the oil dissolves and carries the spice flavours, and delivers it
to the dish; don't skim on the garlic, double what you think is
reasonable, and that's probably not actually enough; don't skimp on
the quality of the ingredients – this isn't an exercise in masking
mouldy spuds and past-it meat.
It must be easier to have happy diners
when the general whiff of the whole area is making then hungry,
making them almost drool. That's the effects the smells pouring out
of the snack bars, restaurants and takeaways has on me. Add the
colours of the stacked exotics at the shops and markets, and it's
impossible not to come away not just well-fed, but with bags of
ingredients to take home and get cooking with.
All that isn't to say that it has to be
curry or nothing. Just that increasingly, it has become the failsafe
option when low-cost food's on the menu. I've become disillusioned
with a fish and chip industry that, apparently, is booming, but that
seems dominated by style over substance. Old enough to have eaten
from some soggy, greasy paper wrapped in layers of yesterdays news,
the black ink staining my fingers, I long for some retro-fashion, and
don't really like the fancy boxes, wooden forks, and sanitised
experience that goes with some pretty mediocre food. It's the same
with greasy spoons. Breakfasts vary between overpriced and decent and
overpriced rubbish, and the diversification hasn't been a good thing.
You don't go to a café for scrambled eggs, or porridge, or poached
eggs on toast. You want Holland and Barrett, next door, mate. Cafés
are not for innovation. I don't want some nouvelle cuisine
mini-breakfast, thanks. I'd rather not bother. There were two cafés
that took a slightly different approach, in the 1970's or early 80's.
Peter Burden would've dragged me along to both, in between whatever
we were up to earning a bit extra. Heading roughly north along
Blackshaw Road, past the turning for the hospital, there was a place
on the right that invented low-cost carvery lunches. They specialised
in sliced roast beef and pork, with chips and peas. On the Purley Way
there was a large, industrial catering enterprise. Metal trays of
traditional, school-diner type fare, lined up. Up grabbed a tray and
told them what to pile onto your plate. Steak and kidney pudding,
plenty of kidney (cheaper) in a rich gravy and soft pastry, with
boiled spuds, cabbage and carrots, and some more gravy poured over
the lot. Checkout, sit, eat, go. A precursor to the top floors at
branches of BHS. He would've dragged me, because even then I would've
wanted to go to the curry takeaways in Tooting or the one at Clapham
South, for some tinfoil trays of delicious spiciness.
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