Cookbook Survivor: Shamil Thakrar, Kavi Thakrar, and Naved Nasir, Dishoom
Saturday's Child Works Hard for a Living
Normally I buy a cookbook connected with a restaurant after I’ve eaten there and it connects me to that experience, like a keepsake. (So for one, I only buy restaurant cookbooks when I really liked the restaurant.) In this case, I bought Dishoom because it looked really interesting and fun, without knowing about the restaurant itself.
On first reading, I actually fell for the mix of genuinely historical images and reminscences and the incredibly carefully crafted simulacrum of images and mood around the restaurant itself, so I didn’t really grasp somehow that this was a quite current chain in the United Kingdom (now with eight branches, started in 2010).
During my recent work in London, I finally put all the pieces together and understood both the restaurant and the cookbook correctly. Up to that point, I’d only used the book twice and I was sort of pleased with the results but not blown away by them either. This left me feeling very curious about the restaurant itself, and there was one fairly near to where we were staying. When a friend took me up to Southall for lunch at Chaudhry’s TKC, he mentioned in passing that Dishoom was also a great option, so my daughter and I decided to give it a shot.
I’m really glad we did. (We went twice.) I normally think small chain restaurants are going to struggle to deliver food that is better than average, simply because all of them need to work from idiot-proof menu designs that a basically competent chef can execute well enough. You can’t be doing high-end food that takes a lot of delicate work or constant attention. But Dishoom is a good exception—it’s a well-oiled corporate machine that feels a bit like Vegas-meets-Mumbai-meets the 1950s in terms of the level of schtick involved in the decor and menu design, but the food is pretty great.
So my daughter and I came back determined to dive into the cookbook. On Sunday, I’m going to make the special house black daal which was pretty much the best tasting daal of its kind that I’ve ever had, I’m going to make some chapatis, and I’m going to make two different kinds of skewered chicken—the tikka masala (which is not made in the conventional way—vinegar instead of yogurt) and the murgh malai (which is more like a conventional tikka masala), basically because my daughter liked both of those very much. I might make the chilli cheese toasts as well but those are pretty simple and I’m not sure I even need to look at the cookbook to make them.
Yum!