Five Indian restaurants in London

DID the Indian restaurant, with its flock wallpaper and piped sitars and tablas, its biryanis and vindaloos, save British cuisine? It was in the '60s that Indian restaurants began to proliferate, and four decades later, in 2002, Robin Cook, the foreign minister, hailed chicken tikka masala as a true national dish of Britain. Previously, there was only fancy French food out of the reach of most, and the bland boiled nursery yuck that generations of Britons had had little choice but to swill, and tell themselves they liked.

India gave Britain chutney, mustard, pepper, curry and mulligatawny soup. It gave Britain flavor. It even gave Jamie Oliver's trademark “pukka.”

I remember discovering biryanis as a teenager. They were an incredible value. Your rice and meat came mixed together, with a vegetable curry on the side — two meals in one, in effect. And so good. So profoundly did those meals enter my psyche that even today I only have to hear sitar music and it brings on a Pavlovian salivation, with olfactory hallucinations of cumin.
Britain is now as cuisine-obsessed as anywhere. Chefs are big stars. Food has become a facet of fashionable style in England.

So where does this leave the traditional Indian restaurant, with its menu of rich, variously colored curries that come in mild, medium and hot, usually with a film of oil swimming on top, and its clientele that swells after 11 p.m. when the pubs close?

Whatever beneficent effect Indian cuisine had on the British palate has doubled back. There's a new generation of high-end Indian restaurants that argue with plausibility that their cooking is just as sophisticated as any others, and why shouldn't they too receive Michelin stars, as four in London have, including three of the five below.

To investigate this new Indian cuisine, I set off with a couple of old friends to where it all started — a traditional hole-in-the-wall.

HOT STUFF

Hot Stuff has been winning rapturous praise for nearly two decades, since the Dawood family opened it in 1988. It sits in a row of little shops on a side street in Lambeth, south of the river (where “My Beautiful Laundrette” was filmed). It's tiny — two rows of plastic tables and chairs, a kitchen at the back with hip-hop keeping the cooks lively, and a front window decorated with frosted glass flames. The air is thick with cumin and garam masala, the blend of spices endemic to Indian cuisine.

Personally, I love a place that looks worse than it is — somewhere special in disguise. Run by Raj Dawood, son of the original owners, Hot Stuff was recently included in a Times of London Magazine survey as not only one of the best cheap restaurants in London, but one of the city's best Indian restaurants in any price range. “We do home-style cooking just like my mum did at home,” Mr. Dawood said. If he grew up with food like this, he was a lucky kid.

First, little dishes of tamarind, tomato and lime chutneys arrived, along with a bowl of papadum, the Indian restaurant's answer to chips and salsa. Various starters followed: excellent king prawns in garlic and chili, on a small dollop of tomato and onion sauce; jeera chicken wings cooked in ginger and cumin, whose flesh melted off the bone, served in a tamarind and date sauce sweetened with blocks of raw cane sugar; soft potato and spinach bhajis.

Oil can be the bane of Indian meals. So can sweetness. As Mr. Dawood puts it, curries are meant to be savory not sweet, but today many Indian restaurants add fruit and nuts to satisfy the British sweet tooth. The main dishes here are clean, dry, free of the ubiquitous film of oil.

We had three: lamb dopiaza, a staple of Indian restaurants, made fierce with black peppercorns, along with sweet peppers; kehrala chicken, another standard, but with not too much sauce, so you could pick out the individual flavors of the ginger, coconut and curry leaves; and king prawn masala, made with black tiger prawns, rich with onion, tomato and coriander.

On the side, a dish of butternut squash with spinach, in which the bitter and sweet elements went well together; and a “Bad Boy,” a huge thin nan bread folding off the edge of its oversize plate.

Clean, bursting with aromatic flavor, at £15 a head, or $29 at $1.99 to the pound, this meal would be hard to beat.

AMAYA

Amazingly, this Michelin-starred “Indian grill” in the heart of international Sloaneland, between Knightsbridge and Belgravia, somehow did manage to beat Hot Stuff — admittedly at three times the price.
Amaya is a whole new concept in Indian. As the proprietors explain on the menu, they don't do either starters or main courses. All dishes are small, something like Indian tapas — though the gorgeous presentation is more reminiscent of sushi.

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