Spice Merchant

Food

I ordered off the Christmas menu:

• Nepali Chingri - Larger Prawns steamed with tamarind bay leaf and garlic, fairly hot with a sweet and sour taste - there was only one prawn, and it sure was large. However, the sauce was more on the sweet rather than the sour side
• Kalyanji Gosht - Tender pieces of lamb cooked slowly with kalyanji (a fragrant herb) in a home made style spiced sauce fairly hot and truly traditional in its flavours - definitely not hot, and the lamb not tender. I didn’t detect said herb, the sauce being very tomato based
• Broccoli Bhaji - Broccoli stir fried with light spices - best dish in terms of flavour, although the broccoli is very soft from the cooking
• Peshwari Nan - the nan was cold by the time it got to me, and was not something to write home about
• Pistachio kufti - did its job, but not really much flavour, more like a palette cleanser.

Rating - 5.5

Atmosphere

Situated right by the DLR, this is in a modern building split into 2 levels. We were seated on a long table upstairs, with posh tablecloth, cutlery, and high class Christmas crackers. It’s good to get away from the corporate Canary Wharf, and if you get a seat by the window on a sunny day, it would be very nice.

Rating - 2

Service

To be fair, they did warn us since we did not all want to order off the Christmas menu, the food would take awhile… still, the restaurant was mostly empty, and it took a long time for our food to arrive. And when it arrived, it was in drip and drap, so that if you got your food early and was waiting for other people, your food was pretty much cold. I give them points for trying, but the execution was not well done.

Rating - 2.5

C-factor

The x’mas menu was £19.95 per person.

Rating - 0.5

Brownie Points - 10.5

Info

38 Salter Street
London
E14 8BL
Phone +44 (0) 20 7987 8779
Website