Hi All,
Yes I quite agree with you C.K and Extrahot ,
It's funny really how quality varies so much from take-away to take-away and region to region.
I was in Wakefield last week on a course and right near the hotel was an Indian take-away of the McDonalds style, it was called Abdul's. It had a long counter, your order was input on a computer which sent it to the chef for preparation. Everything was being made a couple of feet away in front of you. There were even boxes for kids of the "happy meal" type for their food to go in.
Not that it sold burgers but it was mainly a take-out and not eat in and it was very busy every night. In fact there were queues forming 6 deep right from opening time to late at night.
Seeing that and getting a recommendation from a colleague gave me the excuse I needed to try it out.
One good thing was you could see close at hand what was being done and what was being used. There were about 8 chefs, 3 huge cookers with 6 rings on each and enough frying pans on the go to feed an army. This was curry cooking production line style!
I ordered a Chicken Jalfrezi, Pilao Rice and a Naan Bread. Who said ?greedy b--ger? ?
The chef received my order and in a freshly washed fry pan without any oil he added three good spoonful?s of base sauce which very much looked like KD style. It had the colour and consistency of many base sauces we see all the time on this site so nothing special there.
In went a spoonful of what I can only describe as Ghee but it was partly melted so hard to define along with a spoon-tip full of coriander powder, one of cumin and a good handful of chopped coriander.
He thern put in pre-cooked chicken tikka pieces, some pre-cooked peppers and whacked it on the flames. My pan went on the left hand cooker and as he did that he took the pan from the far right which was finished and moved all the pans (5 of them) a place to the right. He stirred them all from left to right rather like a plate spinner trying to keep them from falling, and went back to mine. He tipped the pan and a four foot flame leaped up into the roof, maybe that Ghee was nitro-glycerin!!. By this time he had another fresh order on his left and my pan had moved another place on to the right. This happened a couple more times by which time my curry had moved over to the right and then into it's container.
I must say it was a sight to marvel at and a lesson to me how to cope with such huge demand. This place must make a mint!
But for me there was nothing exceptional about this food. It was o.k. but not brilliant. I have made many better myself and it certainly didn't have anything like that smokey taste in it. But I am not surprised really as all the ingredients he used were for a start minimal and not a hint of spiced oil? ( apart from some ghee ) was used.
The rice was fine and the Naan bread was a bit dry and not very fluffy at all.
It does go to show that we are all subject to judging by what we have local to us and one persons "curry to die for" is anothers very average effort.
I got a reccomendation to this place so obviously my colleague thinks this place is great but I would only say it was worth a visit if you wanted a decent cheap meal not a memorable one.
The key word is "average" and I think a lot of restaurants will only produce average food as this will always appeal to the widest range of customers and therefore make more money.
I agree we can all make better curries than some of our locals. After all we are more dedicated here to finding that perfect dish than making our living cooking hundreds of "fast-food" curries without any care to it's quality.
But there are some really excellent take-aways around and a good few near me, thank goodness for that.
There are some I just can?t beat and because of this will continue the quest for the answer. In the meantime as you will agree we have this site to look to for a lot of the answers and a goldmine of knowledge of our favourite food.
Regards
Ray G