It’s National Curry Week. Not that that means anything to me right now. I’ve been in bed all week suffering the effects of an illness that apparently doesn’t exist; coughing, spluttering, sore throat, muscle pains, headache and fever. We’ve both had it. Our house has been fun. We had plans. I was supposed to go to lunch with a friend and dinner with the wife. There was a wine tasting. A trip to London with work. I wasn’t supposed to watching back-to-back episodes of Married at First Sight for six hours.
Last night at half eleven I received some praise from a client we’d done some work for. He said, and I quote, that I “write so beautifully”. I needed that, it really helped during the time it took for the painkillers to kick in whilst I played Football Manager and watched Royal Rumble 1999 in the background. So now, semi-dosed up on drugs, semi-naked on be sofa, paying semi-attention to ‘Is This Cake’, I’m going to tell you about Spice Fusion, because it’s National Curry Week, which is literally the first line of this review.
Spice Fusion isn’t the most original of names. Google tells me that there are at least nine of them in the UK, and a further look tells me that almost all of them are generic, run-of-the-mill menus with anglicised versions of dishes that bear little semblance to the originals. At first glance you’d likely put Stourport’s in the same bracket. They have balti, madras, and korma, whilst starters are a predictable line of somasa, pakora, and chili paneer. They serve chips. And yet, the chef here is a different pedigree. I know and like Sudha a lot. Like his food at No.25. Liked him on TV on Iron Chef. He can cook. So much so that we took the 25 minute drive from Sophie’s parents to go see what the food is about.
The opening twenty minutes did little to dispel that generic Spice Fusion feeling. The building is huge; an ex pub, I’m guessing at least 140 covers, each table dressed in paper cloth. The poppadoms were your average poppadom, as were the pots of sauces, even if the mixed pickle hinted at something more special in the kitchen. And then the chicken sizzler – a tawa, if we’re being proper – with fragrant chicken pieces on onions and peppers. Nice enough. More than nice enough, actually. Just not groundbreaking. Better is the lamb chops. These are excellent lamb chops, kissed with smoke and almost falling off the bone from the marinade.
And then the quality shows. Four curries, three of whom are as good as you’ll find for this price and this style. King prawn kadha and chicken Simla Mirch both from the more southern parts of India which showed in the fresher style of tomato sauce and not-so-subtle use of garlic. They both share excellent treatment of protein and fresh, hand ground spices – in this case black pepper and cumin. There is no dusty generic spicing. It’s fresh and that translates into the eating.
Absolute star of the day is the railway lamb, cooked traditionally on the bone, slowly for that gravy, almost stewed quality. What makes it is two things; firstly the complex masala that includes the warming spice of casia bark, mace, and clove. The second, and somewhat more importantly, is timer . A dish like this allows no shortcuts, no quick fixes. The meat needs time. The sauce needs time to thicken with the bone marrow and potato starch. What you get on your plate has been ticking away since the morning. It is magnificent. The final dish, a keema pea bhuna is lacking much of what makes the railway lamb so special. It could be from anywhere.
Add an excellent garlic naan, mushroom rice and several whisky and cokes and you get a bill for £70 that could easily be halved with more sensible ordering. It’s early days for the new chef here; we were invited to the launch which we couldn’t make due to a holiday, and yet the signs are already looking up. That railway lamb is a straight-up ten, the others curries and lamb chops mostly excellent, the rest a step below. I expect with time they’ll open up to more of what makes them different from the other Spice Fusions, the skill of crafting the many flavours and styles of India.
8/10
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