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Curry Garden, Rushden

Food with Passion was looking forward with anticipation to this meal. The chef Joynul has been in the top 8 Indian Chef's of the year for the last three years, coming second in each of 2007 and 2008 competitions.

That set us with mighty high expectations, and although we have many Indian restaurantsmuch closer, the fact that the chef had won these awards enticed us to travel further afield to sample a great meal.

Restaurant: Curry Garden, Church Street, Rushden Cuisine: Indian

Meal Taken: Takeaway

Website: http://thecurrygarden.co.uk/

Opinion of the website

The website is nothing fancy, but is pretty easy to navigate around and contained exactly what we were looking for - a menu.

We picked our dishes from the menu, but later discovered that the menu was out of date and did not fully reflect the current menu - at least one dish was no longer available and we also found that the prices were also incorrect and had been increased since publication, so not a great start.

The Ordering Process

As telephone ordering processes go, this was one of the better experiences as there was no pressure to upsell and persuade you to take additional side dishes. Unfortunately, during the call we were advised that one of our appetisers was not featured on the current menu and we therefore had to make an alternate selection.

It might also have been nice for the order value to have been confirmed to me during the call as it only became obvious later upon collection that prices had actually been increased.

For two adults we settled upon

Appetisers : 1 Chicken Tikka, 1 Lamb Tikka (substituted for the unavailable prawn roll)

Mains : 1 Chilli Chicken Mossalla, 1 Lamb Methi

Rice/Bread : 1 Boiled Rice, 1 Peshwari Naan, 1 Keema Naan

Picking Up/Delivery: As we were outside the free delivery radius, we had opted to pick up the order (remember, we were travelling past many more local restaurants because of the chef's reputation).

The order was not ready at the appointed time, but came about 10 minutes late. That is acceptable to me, especially as I was a new customer - maybe they wanted to avoid a hoax order and see me on site?

Anyway, the staff were bursting with pride at managing to retain the 2nd place in the competition, although somewhat disappointed about not managing to improve to 1st place over 2007's result. We chatted a bit and I spoke about the Food with Passion website and the likelihood that their food would be featured as a review article and the wait passed quickly.

The restaurant itself is a small one with maybe around 10 booths allowing for maybe 50-60 covers and on the date of review (26th February 2008) had no diners. This was however a Tuesday early evening and perhaps trade had still to pick up for the evening.

For diners and takeaway customers alike, there are ample public parking spaces available to the rear of the restaurant arising from the fact that it is close to Rushden town centre.

The Meal

Appetizers

Although we substituted one item in our appetisers because of the new menu, perhaps it was no bad thing that we chose Tikka appetiers as these are simply prepared dishes and give one the opportunity to assess the quality of the ingredients as they are not interfered with too much.

The Tikka, chicken and lamb both were very tender and nicely spiced without the vivid artificial colouring from some establishments. Although I never thought to enquire whether the chicken was free range (I suspect not as it is rare for catering establishments to push the costs up), it was clearly breast meat. The lamb of indeterminatecut was both lean and tender to the bite.

The appetiser was accompanied with a traditional bagged salad of letuce, tomato and cucumber with a lemon wedge and a yoghurt based sauce.

The salad was freshly prepared, obvious by the crunch to the ingredients and refreshing, however the sauce had little flavour and we have no idea what it actually was.

Overall a good start to the meal.

Mains

Things went a little bit wrong here in Food with Passion's opinion. Now we freely admit that we cannot claim to be an expert in authentic Indian cuisine, but for us there were a few mistakes with these dishes.

We would not fault the Chilli Chicken Mossalla, though The Curry Garden use a completely different recipe to other UK Indian restaurants as it did not have a tomato based sauce - it was prepared win quite a dry style with onions, chillis and flaked almonds forming the basis of the flavours alongside the chicken (which appeared to be tasty thigh meat). So...although this dish was different to what we expected it was very spicy and flavoursome.

The Lamb Methi was a different proposition though. Methi is prepared with fenugreek and normally has an almost menthol note to it. However the chef lost the plot here when he seasoned this dish and the overpowering flavour was salt making the dish most unpleasant to eat, ruining one of Food with Passion's favourite dishes.

In both mains, we have no complaint of poor quality meats ... the meats used throughout were tender and a good raw ingredient.

The sides of a simple boiled rice and 2 Naans also provided considerable disappointment. Whilst the boiled rice was OK (I would hope so!), the Naans seemed to be still quite doughy and whereas the Peshwari Naan was flavoured well with fruit, almonds and coconut consistently throughout , the Keema Naan was barely introduced to the spiced minced meat filling.

There is something nice about the charring of a Naan when cooked inside a tandoor oven. Based upon the rather blond appearance of our two naans, it does not appear that The Curry Garden uses a tandoor to prepare their naans,. If not, that may explain our somewhat doughy and disappointing naans.

Experience Overall

This was a considerable letdown after all the promise from the chef making runner-up in the national Indian Chef of the Year competition.

I now question whether the competition food was prepared to a higher standard than the restaurant food itself. Food with Passion expected a much better meal considering the accolades. There can be absolutely no excuse for over-salting a meal and serving it.

Will Food with Passion return? Maybe ..... only because the meats and salads were of good quality and apparent freshness. But there were enough negatives about the meal for us to avoid it for the foreseeable future.

Please discuss the review in our forum or contact us at info@foodwithpassion.co.uk if you have anything to add.

Author: Food with Passion Date: 28th Feb 2008