Indian food can, famously, make your eyes water, but more usually as a result
of singeing your palate rather than your wallet. But at Rasoi Vineet Bhatia
in Chelsea – an Indian restaurant that aims to compete more with London’s
finest, and priciest, French and Italian dining rooms than with those
high-street Indians that serve an all-purpose curry the colour of George
Hamilton’s tan – it’s the prices that might make your tears flow.
So often nowadays you eat somewhere for the first time, and you wonder if
it’s one of those made-for-TV restaurants they create for series like Hell’s
Kitchen, and if there are hidden “Candid Camera” lenses filming your
reactions to the food or to the eye-popping prices.
You walk into Vineet Bhatia’s restaurant and your mouth says, “Pleasant room,
a bit dimly lit perhaps, a few empty tables for a Saturday night...” But
what your brain is saying is, “Pleasant room... The prices!...
a bit dimly lit perhaps... Look at the prices! Just for a curry!...
a few empty tables for a Saturday night... Hasn’t anyone else noticed
the prices?”
You don’t want to sound like one of Wilde’s cynics who knows the price of
everything and the value of nothing, but curries that range up to £32, not
including £16 starters, or £6 side dishes, certainly raise expectations. The
gourmand tasting menu runs to £69 per person, plus another £45 for six
glasses of wine to wash it down. For those kind of prices, you wonder if
maybe it includes a lapdance from Halle Berry, or from Monica Bellucci.
Which is, of course, just being stupid. Because at those prices it must
obviously include a lapdance from both of them.
As your eyes gambol around the menu, you wonder if, when the credit-card slip
for the meal is processed, it will mark the first instance of your bank’s
call centre in Bangalore phoning you, rather than you calling them, in order
to alert you to a possible fraud on your account:
Bangalore call-centre worker: “It says here that you have a debit for £180
for an Indian meal for two. Ha ha ha!”
You: “Yes, that’s right.”
Bangalore: “Yeah, right! Who are you trying to kid? That’s enough Indian food
to feed 80 people.”
You: “Not in Chelsea, it isn’t.”
Bangalore: “So what’s this other sum of £180 for?”
You: “That’s for the cardiologist I had to consult after seeing that
restaurant bill.”
It’s not that Vineet Bhatia’s food isn’t delicious, and several notches above
the kind of food you will eat in the Raj Palace in your local high
street: it is. But sometimes in a slightly wearying way: dish after dish,
perfectly executed, precisely flavoured, but just that little bit show-offy.
The combinations of ingredients, the presentations, the occasional
nouvelle-cuisine preciousness, together have an air of please-love-me
desperation about them; like being cooked for by Laurence Olivier’s Archie
Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer.
Even the crockery nags you for attention. The first course on the gourmand
menu is a single grilled, spice-crusted scallop, poised on a ping-pong ball
of chilli mash. It is served sunk into a large plate containing a matching
ping-bong-ball-sized depression at its centre. You don’t know whether to
rescue it or to eat it.
A crab cake with the dimensions of a thimble comes skewered on a cocktail
stick which is rested across an eggcup-shaped soup bowl: the soup bowl is in
turn balanced on an alarmingly tilted platter and remains attached only by
magnets. Yes, magnets.
A plate containing a shard of grilled lobster, alongside curry leaf and
broccoli khichdi, is dusted flamboyantly at the table with cocoa powder,
like an elaborate cappuccino. And when served a wild mushroom khichdi,
separated from a spicy ice-cream by a coin-sized papadum, the waiter tells
you that, “The chef recommends please to have the tomato ice-cream and the
mushroom khichdi at the same time.”
Don’t you find it can slightly disturb the rhythm of an evening when each
course has to be explained in detail to you as it is served, because
otherwise its composition might remain as mysterious as Monica Lewinsky’s
sex appeal? Or when you need a manual or, at the very least, instructions
from the kitchen, as to how to eat it?
And this is certainly not the restaurant’s fault – since it was we who chose
the tasting menu to get a sense of the range of the kitchen’s skills, which
are certainly spectacular – but there is also something wearying about being
interrupted nine times during a meal to be handed another micro-portion of
food, along with a detailed description of what’s on the plate, as if maybe
someone is going to test you at the end of the evening. After a while, you
just want to tell the waiter, “Look, I know you mean well, but just bring it
all to the table now.”
The upside of this succession of modest portions is that you’re not going
to leave Rasoi with that common feeling of post-Indian bloatedness. Often
after eating an Indian meal you feel so weighed down that you wonder if
maybe you ate a medicine ball as part of your starter selection. It’s quite
possible that Newton discovered gravity after eating an Indian takeaway and
finding his belly drawn powerfully towards the ground by some
irresistible force of Nature.
Also the waiting staff here are friendly: assuming you can see them. The
dining room is so dimly illuminated that unless you live on a diet of
carrots, your eyes might struggle to read the menu. Why not take along one
of those bedtime book- reading lights that you strap around your forehead,
like a bandana, in order to avoid keeping your partner awake at night when
you’re reading a book you’re far too embarrassed to be seen reading in
broad daylight on a bus?
Did I mention the prices? Oh yes, I believe I did. Just a mint tea costs
£4.50, which cleverly gives you indigestion and aids digestion both at the
same time. But then this is high-class, labour-intensive cooking, which uses
enough fancy crockery per diner to keep a family in plates for three days.
It costs. And, to his credit, the waiter suggested an Austrian Gruener
Veltliner which, at £28, was at the very lower end of a novella-length wine
list.
Still, the bill is so fat that they bring it to you in a little casket. It’s a
bit of fun to round off the evening. Knowing the likely size of the
contents, you wonder if maybe Noel Edmonds might suddenly appear to make you
a rival offer from Vineet Bhatia, as in Deal Or No Deal, before you unseal
your box. The offer could be more than your real bill; could be less.
As soon as my credit-card payment had been electronically cleared by the
waiter, my phone rang. It was the call centre in Bangalore. “I’ve just got a
debit for £180 come through. Are you seeing that Harley Street cardiologist
again?” the voice asked. “No,” I said. “Not yet.”
Rasoi Vineet Bhatia
10 Lincoln Street, London SW3 (020-7225 1881; www.vineetbhatia.com)
Open for lunch Monday to Friday; dinner Monday to Saturday. Closed Sunday.
Giles Coren is away
