DATE NIGHT IN DISHOOM

One rainy evening, while I was dropping my wife off at a restaurant in Gants Hill, London, she was telling me that lots of her friends and bhabis (sister-in-laws) go to fancy restaurants around the country and city, and where do they get all the time?! I was not quite sure if it was a trick question or not so I kept my mouth shut while listening to her keenly. Yes, that’s what husbands do when they do not want to get in trouble. 😛 But the way she said it got me thinking, waaait a second why don’t we roam around the city and the country ourselves and try different restaurants and foods. We are foodies. So normally, what happens is that me and my wife goes for random walks, around the same place near our house, and end up spending on foods that we now end up eating regularly! I think I’ve at least spent a minimum of 30 GBP on Shingara (an Indian pastry with meat inside or potatoes 😛) at Nisha’ cafe on Green Street (a post for another day…). So I made a plan with my wife that we’d try nice restaurants all around the UK, well, right after I get paid every month. Going to fancy places to eat in the middle of the month or towards the end of the month is not a good plan at all unless you want to borrow money from your wife while taking her on a date 😛

I know too much tongue-sticking emojis 😂 I am a sort of person who likes to spend all of his money within the first week of me getting my salary. Don’t worry guys no gambling habit or anything, I just like to clear my bills as early as possible each month and whatever I have left is my ‘play money’ as I like to call it! My wife, often is unhappy about it and sneaks in money into my account 🙂- which I send her back! These back and forth, cat and mouse is a common theme every month. Aaaanyway back to Dishoom. So this fateful Sunday evening I dressed up in my dinner jacket, paired with my white trousers (my inner narcissism was playing and I was looking into the mirror and trying to look good for dear wife-she was just smirking and rolling her eyes). The wife also dressed up, did her usual make-up and was looking superb! I don’t want to offend anyone here so not going into the details of all the name of makeup products and brands name or anything 😀 So we both got ready and went to my mother-in-law’s house to drop off some fish for her to cook. Well it was an excuse for me to go to her house and taste some of her famous aubergine pakoras, she is such a good cook. But unfortunately she didn’t make it by then. So had a cup of tea, chatted with the family, and was on our way to Dishoom. The whole underground I was being a chatter-box as usual and was telling dear wife that the food probably will not be nice, she was quite enthusiastic about the food, telling me that her colleagues quite liked it. I was still doubtful. -.-

So we came to the Dishoom around 8.30? I need to ask wife about the exact time. We went to the one near Covent Garden -wife wanted a nice walk before we went in. The walk was nice, it’s like those hip parts of town, good shops and fancy restaurants. As we were walking towards the restaurant, I was telling my wife that we probably would not find it busy at this time of the day, but I was so wrong. As we came towards the restaurant, we saw a looong waiting line outside the restaurant, a wait for 25-minutes to get a seat for two 😛 It was good to see there was quite a cultural mix of people to have the desi foods. The nice part was how they showed good hospitality by bringing the people outside in the queue a nice, desi style glass of tea! We were quite touched by that. It’s those strong desi milk teas in those small glass cups that I used to have quite regularly in Bangladesh and India. The tea tasted quite nice, not too sweet with a zing-y taste of ginger- my wife became a fan instantly!

The chai were given in glass cups like this! This a photo of chai is from a different restaurant we went to, I just wanted to show what the cups looked like!

So after the fateful 25 minutes wait, we were ushered inside the warmly lit restaurant. It was brilliantly furnished, instantly reminding me of the old bars near Kolkata and Bombay, which got me a bit nostalgic. Soft music was playing, and I could see people chattering with friends and families, a warm atmosphere. The waiters got us the menu and I instantly jumped on it- I was hungry, folks! We already had a fair idea of what we were going to order, from asking family and friends; definitely the “okra fries” and their famous black daal. My sister-in-law suggested the starter, and guess what? It was really delicious. But from then on, it went downhill for me 🙂 My wife keeps saying I was exaggerating, but I was not, guys – the food had flavours but was not that tasty and definitely not deserving of the hype it got. We ordered the chilli chicken starter-which was not spicy at all! 😂 The lamb curry looked and smelt good but tasted a bit funky as the sauce was quite thick for my palate. The rice was quite hard, so it took some time and effort to chew it and swallow – It felt like the texture of both the lamb curry and the rice was a bit thick and didn’t quite complement each other, which is a strange thing for a curry to do to rice. My wife says the rumali roti was delicious, incredibly soft and thin, but in my opinion, it tasted like any roti i’d get in any home in Bangladesh – which my wife points out is probably a good thing. Normally, when I think of desi food, I think of eye and mouth watering food that is bursting with spices and melts in your mouth-which I didn’t find here unfortunately. But my wife is quite optimistic when it comes to food-so she says the mutton aside, it was flavoursome. 😛

We ordered their house special, “Black Daal,” which was a deep brown in color, but for some reason it tasted like a dessert my mom used to make for me when I was young and it had too much cheese, yogurt, and milky stuff. In a nutshell, it didn’t taste like a daal at all! My wife agreed 😛 I ordered a drink with a mixture of stuff and there was chaat masala in it, which I found quite nice but wife hated it, She thought the chaat we got as a starter should have had chaat masala in it but it is my drink which has it 😣

After all the drama with our main food and starter ended, wifey got tea, It was the same one we had outside and got a dessert, and guess what, folks, it tastes the same as Sainsbury’s Gu. I was actually disappointed. If you didn’t try Gu, go have it, it’s tasty, but when I take my wife out for a date, I don’t like a Gu tasting dessert on my table 🙂

The bill came at the end, and it was 90 GBP, including the service charge. I didn’t mind. The food was absolutely horrible (to me, my wife was fine), the hospitality and ambience were top notch but the best thing of the evening was my dear wife and her company. ❤️

After the horrible food, I went to my mother-in-law’s and ate her famous aubergine pakoras and fish curry with lemon. The food was so tasty, but I was eating slowly because of all the non-tasty food that I filled my belly with. One thing I again realised is that nothing can beat home-cooked food, especially food that is cooked by your loved ones; it just tastes different! Well these are all cheesy words; in short, my mother-in-law is just a great cook 😛