Omar reminds me of the history of the Birmingham balti on the way back from lunch. How the initial Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani houses started the restaurants for their own communities, found fans in the Irish immigrants who settled and drank in the same areas, and gradually became more successful in those who had called the city home for some time. Soon the demand was so much that they spread to every nook of the city, the flavours gradually becoming more and more diluted to appease those pesky white people; the product no longer resembling anything like it would have been in the motherland. More generic, just different levels of chilli powder in the same onion and tomato gloop. We like to think that Birmingham is the home of the curry. Bullshit. I’ve been to four different ones in the last month and all were awful. It’s the dreadful storm of them being complacent and dishes slowly becoming more anglicised to cater for our delicate, can’t handle flavour, British palates.
If lunch at The Vine was anything to go by, the same is happening to Desi pubs, the original safe spaces for the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi factory workers. The Vine was one of the original, and for a long time, widely considered one of the best. On a sunny Friday lunch the terrace is full with every shade of human as long as that shade is white. They have Dire Straights on the speakers. Everyone is eating mixed grills. It’s all very sterile.
The food is awful. I could sugarcoat it, but by the taste of it they’ve done that already. Chicken comes in various shades of colour and varying degrees of cooked; the most natural of which a garlic spiked one that tastes like it was cooked yesterday and only taken off the heat this morning. whilst a bright red one at least feels fresh. There is a green one the shade of an angry Bruce Banner, because, well why? Why are we still dying food? It doesn’t look appetising. It doesn’t mean anything. I want chicken, not a pack of Skittles. The only non chicken item is a sheathed schlong of lamb so finely minced it’s like eating cooked wallpaper paste if they had dyed the wallpaper paste a shade of terracotta and not cooked it quite long enough so that it coagulates in the mouth.
Think that’s bad, well you haven’t seen anything yet. We order the chilli chicken because Omar loves Indo-Chinese and he’s paying. It arrives looking like the scene in The Predator where he disembowels one of the military but doesn’t taste as fresh; old chicken coated in a jarred sweet and sour sauce, with raw onions and other bits of can’t-quite-be-arsed. I’ve never seen Omar leave food before, and I suggest it’s sweet enough to take back to his young son. He tells me he’d never feed a child this. He’s right.
The boneless mixed grill is £18, the chilli chicken £12, and a decent garlic naan £3. It’s extremely depressing how one of the originals has become so bad, so bloody anglicised and pastiche. No soul, weak cooking, and high bill; the exact opposite of why desi pubs started in the first place.
3/10
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