I don’t know where to start here. I really, honestly, don’t. But let’s try at the end, when I am collecting the remains of dinner in a plastic white bag, with sweat pouring down my brow and onto my shirt. The card machine is down, along with the music and all forms of common sense. I pay with the last of the cash from my wallet, despite them offering for me to settle up next time. “Just give it a week or two and all the issues will be ironed out”, I am told. It is not exactly music to my ears; I’ve waited years for this place to reopen, another fortnight would hardly have made a difference.
Deolali is a place that holds many memories for me. Well over ten years ago when it first opened it was a place I would go on dates with girls I met in bars and had no long term plans for. The room was beautiful, arguably the best in Birmingham at that point, being all vaulted ceilings, split-level flooring, and imposing bar to the far right-hand side. The food was less of a selling point. They had a chicken curry with banana that will never leave the depths of my brain, but they did an okay tikka masala which would add a dress size just by looking at it. I don’t think that anyone came here for the food. Having returned now the doors have once again opened, that isn’t going to change any time soon.
In the grand scheme of dropped bollocks, the fact that I was turned away from my initial attempt at dinner because they weren’t ready to open is now so minute that I had almost forgotten about it. When I return an hour later there I have the great view of a builder still at work, from a table in a room so hot I could rub salt into the skin on my arms and turn it to crackling. I order food and wait. And wait. And wait. When the food finally does begin to show after 55 minutes it is clear that this is the Kelly Brook of restaurants. It still has a great front after all these years and absolutely nothing between the ears. Chicken Mo-Mo is notionally a Nepalese dumpling dish, and here we have inch-thick pale foreskins filled with a little curried chicken. They are hard work and not particularly nice to eat. I quite like the red spicy sauce it is served with, so I ask what it is. They don’t know because the chef is still ‘experimenting”. Please don’t tell me that. They come back and tell me it is tamarind and yogurt. It’s not, I tell them, that is the fickle decoration to the side of the plate. They go and ask again and tell me once more that it is tamarind and yogurt. I give in. A lamb keema scotch egg has a solid egg yolk with bland mince packed as tightly as a US child border camp which leaves as bitter a taste in the mouth. It is one of those dishes that sounds great in principle but never reaches its full potential. I imagine the Indian shepherds pie is the same, though I’m not willing to spend my money again to find out.
From the mains a chilli chicken is a kind of Chinese-Indo dish that should take you into new territory. This does nothing of the sort, just a generous amount of poultry and peppers, with a lot of garlic and no real heat at all. If it says chilli then I want sweat pouring down my face because of it; not because they have left the heating on full blast when it is twenty-six degrees outside. Yes, this really did happen, and only came to my attention after five lovely ladies were sat at a table by a radiator. I enquire if it is really true, to which I am told that if they turn the heating off they will lose hot water in the kitchen. I take a big scoop of a paneer makhani with my garlic naan – the two dishes I actually enjoyed – and ask for both the bill and for the remaining food to be packaged up.
By now I am expecting Manuel to fall through the double doors with my food and say “Mr Fawlty, I no want to work here anymore”, but is it not to be and I pay with cash after the card system eludes them further. Back at my naturally heated home I quite enjoy the makhani dish which is rich and luscious, and improve the chicken by adding fresh chilli. Who would have thought it. Deolali’s attempt at digging out a corpse and giving it mouth-to-mouth has failed miserably, delivering very average food with inept service in exactly the same environment as it used to. Maybe they will be better in time, though I happen to be of the mind-set that if they are taking money from customers then they should be at full pelt from the get-go. I love the building and a great restaurant is there somewhere. I just really don’t think it is going to be Deolali.
4/10
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