Birmingham’s biggest restaurant opening this year is in London. Our biggest culinary export, a two Michelin wielding chef by the name of Aktar Islam, has opened a restaurant in the big smoke called Oudh 1722. And before you think about Aktar’s cooking, get this preposition out of your head; it is nothing like Opheem. They might share the same garam masala recipe, they might use the same customer intel, but that is it. Whilst Opheem is very much a two star restaurant that uses flashes of the subcontinent to push through some very classical technique, Oudh 1722 is very much an Indian restaurant, with kebabs and curry and ultra expensive black leg chickens from France.
The food focuses on Awadhi cuisine, that slow cooked, courtly food of Lucknow. It is typically more melancholy than the rest of India, lower in chilli, more gentle perfumed spice than abrasive heat. Awadhi cuisine assumes that pleasure need not be loud, that richness need not be heavy, and that the highest luxury is often the ability to proceed slowly. The Nawabs themselves, extravagant and doomed, patronised music, poetry, dance and food with the desperation of people who suspected history was already moving against them. Empires often build fortresses when they feel threatened; Awadh built dinners, and big dinners at that. Gary Sambrook would have loved to have been a Nawab.
Anyway, the restaurant. It is gorgeous. Rather brilliantly it inhabits the old Victorian building rather than conquering it. Curtains divide spaces, murals emerge from walls, and the building keeps producing yet another room just when you thought you’d reached the end of it. We are sitting directly in front of the open kitchen watching Aktar and team cooking away to a room full of diners who have come to see what the hype is about. We start with shorba, a delicate, mildly spicy broth of morels and asparagus, and the prettiest gol guppa with a ring of mango and edible flowers into which the minty and bitter-sweet jaljeera is poured. Weeks before at a soft launch, I had the lamb brain bheeja and loved it, but today Sophie wants to try the aubergine, the brainless and therefore vegetarian, version. I’d argue it’s better; a deeply savoury, warming, and smokey dish that works wonders with the soft saffron-spiked sheermal bread.
Gilawat, along with dum biriyani, are the most Lucknow of dishes; melting patties that have more in common with pâté than kebab. These are rich to the point they need the rings of onion and various chutneys within the torn blankets of romali roti to provide relief. Get the balance right and these are sublime. What follows are two of the best things you’ll likely eat; a brick of paneer made from buffalo milk sandwiching a peshwari-like blend of sweet fruit and nuts, and giant prawns the size of Sophie’s arms. These are great – really great – prawns full of intention, smoke, garlic heat, and light acidity from the green mango. So great in fact that she has two of them, which, to you, is forty quids worth of prawn, and to me is a very happy wife.
By now we are stuffed because Oudh 1722 is in keeping with the Awadhi brief of being seriously generous with the portions. In time this might be a place to come for two or three dishes, but today is not that day. Oxtail biryani could realistically feed five given the size, so we eat what we can and take the rest home to eat the following day. It is sublime; rice with chunks of braised oxtail and sweet carrot running rife throughout it. We also take some of the curry back; a tandoori chicken in a smoked tomato sauce lightly scented with, I think, clove and saffron. The bone-in chicken is outstanding quality, the sauce full of nuance. I say it’s better than anything I ate at Gymkhana, whilst Sophie thinks it’s the best curry she has ever eaten. One, maybe both of us, are right. There is a dessert ordered only because a friend of mine insisted that we do when I said I’d booked. It is unsurprisingly the best gulab jamun I have eaten.
Our food element comes £184 but the two carrier bags of food that we leave with suggest that you could do that for much less. Add to that a rather lovely off-beat Argentinian red, and six cocktails and what you have is a very enjoyable Wednesday lunch. We finish our lunch on the top floor nursing digestifs and talking about how great it is to see a Brummie smash it in London and how much we cannot wait to return to confirm Sophie’s theory that this could also be the best vegetarian offering of a restaurant in the country. Believe the hype. They want and will get a Michelin star. Everyone should be planning a trip here, not because Aktar is from Birmingham, but because Oudh 1722 is a very special restaurant.
10/10
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