Nepalese restaurants are like buses; you wait for 43 years for one only to find out that the second one isn’t a bus at all, but a milk float with false advertising and a dodgy engine. Admittingly, that opening line is a push, even by my low standards, but it’s right. Last month I went to The Gurkha Bar & Grill in Stourbridge and heaped praise on the Nepali dishes. Now I’m in Gurkha Imperial Dining in Bromsgrove, a restaurant that identifies as being Nepali in a similar level to me identifying as modest. We’re here with Sophie’s friends from her school years, having one of those catch-ups that get increasingly further apart the older you get, with my wife bringing her ageing husband along for the ride. I’m sitting picking through a not-so-great great curry that I’ve been told is a Nepalese speciality. With this I am drinking a whisky and coke that has no whisky. At least the company is good.
I suppose the warning signs were there. The menu is one long drawn out story of a trek, with lots of dishes that sound Nepali until you look into them. We could have had the Himalayan Frontier, the Dill Gurkha, or the Gurkha House Tikka. As it is a prop in a dhaka topi takes our orders, delivers our poppadoms, and gets the drinks order wrong. From the infuriating section titled ‘Let’s get “STARTERS” to climb’ Sophie and I share the Gurkha Special Tikka which I assume is like the Gurkha House Tikka but, you know, err, more special. It is greasy and cloying, with an identikit blend of spices that have puddled underneath the bird. Given how special it is, the same exact blend of spices in the same puddle of grease turns up on the paneer tikka. Another member of the table orders Tareko Macha, a dish I’ve since Googled. The internet shows me pictures of spiced fish cutlets that have been hard fried to a crust; this looks like three sad strips of non-descript fish that have been dredged through a turmeric heavy batter. They are supposed to arrive with the famously Nepali tartare sauce, though they actually arrive with the famously Nepali sweet chilli sauce.
Mains are okay, passable, kind of edible, but not at all special. Sophie’s Sangam – a word I now know to mean union – is a generic paneer curry with spinach, sweetcorn, beans, and okra. I ordered the Rimjhim because they are giving it the big one with words like ‘top secret’, ‘exquisite’, and ‘dedicated to lovers of hot and spicy’. That’s me, kids. I’ll let you into the top secret; burn the spices and over cook the chicken. Give everything that exquisite charred bitter note that lovers of charred and bitter really love. And don’t forget the chunks of hard onion. There are naans which are really excellent, and a laughable Kathmandu rice that replaces the jewelled fried rice with boiled rice cut with chunks of day-old chicken tikka.
Now I wasn’t sure if I should write this one up; after all it’s an Indian-ish restaurant in a semi-rural suburban town. But two things have led me to do it; first of all it’s full at 7.30 in the evening, and secondly, when doing a smidgeon of research, they have charged us more than the menus say. Not by much, but enough to say that the bill which was £37 each in the group of five should have been more like £34 each. Maybe those who come frequently and often see a different side to Gurkha Imperial Dining to what we did, because from where I sat it looks like their point of difference is a bit of a marketing sham.
4/10
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