So Barney has launched. You probably follow them on Instagram and Twitter because you like to know where you should be eating for dinner, and if you don’t, now is the time to rectify that before people start to judge you for your bad decision making. It’s good fun. I’m not just saying that because I’ve got to spend months talking it through with a mate who loves food as much as me, deciding what really are the top fifty restaurants in Birmingham, and how much bad language is acceptable on the decision tree, but it really is. Everyone who is on the website is there so on merit because we believe that it should be, and we absolutely promise two things: 1) no amount of money is going to get us to include Perios (or, equally, anywhere shit) and 2) that top fifty is going to come under more continuous scrutiny than any Prime Ministers Questions in the last two decades.
Barney is the reason I’m at Royal Watan. At present Shabab’s is our Balti option because it is the best, though I read something from someone knowledgeable about Royal Watan being excellent and thought a bit of competition might do them good. If Shabab’s is no frills, Royal Watan is very much style over substance, though not enough to properly clean the water glasses. They have a flower wall and fake marble. There is illuminated hash-tagged statements on the wall, and a menu section specifically of items ‘for the gram’. It’s like eating dinner in the Love Island villa. We order poppadom’s with the chutney tray; fifty percent of that tray is raw onion which makes it less chutney and more indigestion. The mint sauce and chilli sauce are already pre-bottled on the table. One has a label whilst the other has fallen off.
We take Balti’s for mains. Have to really given why I am here, though the urge to order the Kashmiri pizza was real for all of twenty seconds. One from the house specialities, the other from the ‘build your own Balti’ section which sounds like a Tory initiative for hospitality. Neither taste of much, yet both have chunks of chicken tikka stained so fake red I expect George Galloway to appear and profess to be it’s comrade. One is hot with chilli powder and has puddles of grease, the other with peppers and whole cloves of garlic and more puddles of grease. Chips come in a Madonna tit of branded paper, rice in little porcelain bowls, a naan is barely cooked. It is all very tiring.
I ordered one of those drinks for the gram, it was called The Overload, took thirty minutes to arrive and when it did had cream sliding down one side of the glass jug onto the table. In the age of the gentrified savage there is no hope. The bill hits £42 between the two including a coke, which is hardly expensive but then I’d also like to point out goes mostly unfinished. Royal Watan is precisely the reason why we started Barney, so that you don’t make the same mistakes that we do.The top fifty of Birmingham can sleep easy tonight.
5/10
