It’s stressful choosing a restaurant for friends. If you write about restaurants for a living, then mates are not generally especially forgiving when you take them somewhere that’s rubbish.
This Indian café on Hammersmith’s scruffy main drag certainly doesn’t impress visually. With its tiny shop-conversion premises, I could see the thought bubbles over my guests’ heads: ‘why the hell are we here?’ Even the assured charm of the single waiter did nothing to dispel a general flatness of mood.
And then our first starters arrived: small cups of puri filled with a spicy vodka sauce. Eating them initially produced coughs and splutterings, which quickly morphed into big beamy smiles all round. Phew, all was going to be OK. But actually OK would in no way do justice to the cooking here.
Gowtham Karingi has cooked at Veeraswaamy and Zaika, and his food avoids the westernised feeling of some ‘nouvelle Indian’ cuisine. I’ll spare you the blurb about the ayurvedic principles behind Agni (which means ‘fierce determination’). Suffice it to say, for intelligent, flavour-packed cuisine, this is the real thing.
The menu combines brilliant realisations of old favourites with more exciting evolved dishes. Starters included some excellent chaat and delicious fried squid. Among the main dishes, the stand-outs were Fish Balchao – where tilapia fish had been cooked in a beautifully-spiced sauce – and a deeply intense lamb curry (it’s Roghan Josh Jim, but not as we know it). Unusually for any kind of Indian restaurant, the best was kept till last with a magnificent finale of red chilli ice cream.
If the proof of the pudding is in the eating though, perhaps the true success of the evening was that my friends were so delighted they picked up the bill. At least I’d chosen somewhere for them with bargain prices.
