SINCE I have eaten for scarcely above f20- ish a
head for the past couple of months, I gave in without guilt to the sudden desire for extravagance. Although, on reflection, it isn't really extravagance: Salloo's may be expensive, but eating there fully justifies the expense.
In fact, I first ate the restaurant's food not on site, but at somebody's house. I was invited to dinner by the best cook I know, who said that since she'd just got in from America we might all have to have Indian take-away, and was that all right? I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice as I replied in a small but brave voice, 'Yes. Of course. Lovely.' Politeness paid off. The Indian take-away turned out to be the best Pakistani food I've eaten since I had dinner with the Pakistani cricket team several years ago. Even the charms of Imran Khan paled beside the heady lure of the long tables laid end to end with odoriferously steaming dishes. Now I come to think about it, Salloo's probably cooked that din- ner as well.
There is one problem: Salloo's is an expensive restaurant in an expensive part of town (the Berkeley Hotel end of Kinner- ton Street) and the clientele is much as one would expect; the atmosphere of this small but plainly decorated room — a bit of fret- work, a few bright daubs, magnolia walls and a mass of Moorish cornices its only exuberant features — is stifling with the international set of rich businessmen en relaxe, their least flattering mode. I ate with two other women and this didn't help, for Salloo's is very much a male stronghold. I couldn't help feeling that we got special girlie treatment, which involved an amount of no doubt well-intended but nevertheless irritating condescension.
Although I should like to eat their food again, and soon, I have no burning desire to return to the restaurant and would advise those who think they may feel the same way to use their delivery service. You phone at around 7, give a credit-card num- ber or whatever, and they send the food round in a mini-cab.
The prices might seem stiff, but that is because we all are used to thinking of Indi- an take-aways as cheap. That's partly the point of them. But Salloo's is as far from your high-street Tandoori as Mosimann is from McDonald's, and you wouldn't expect a dinner at the Belfry to cost the same as a couple of Big Macs with fries.
The emphasis of the menu is squarely on meat, rather surprisingly so, but what meat! Start with yakhni, a lamb broth cooked with whole cloves, black cardamom, cinnamon, onions, garlic and ginger, densely reduced and strained and left in the cold room, until, said Mr Salahuddin — Salloo himself — there is a layer of fat 'as thick as your arm', which is removed. The result is a bronze liquid, dark with the murmurings of absorbed spices.
But what made me go to the restaurant were the tandoori chops. The memory of those from that take-away dinner party was too much to ignore. The cutlets are plump little things — two chops are taken and the bone of one and fat of both removed to form each meaty one — smothered in cloves and cardamom, garlic, lemon juice and freshly ground coriander and left to marinade for 24 hours before being plunged into the tandoor. The meat is soft and tender within its hot, dry carapace of oven-charred ground spices.
My next favourite is the gurda masala, a glossy brown stew of lamb kidneys cooked with onions, chopped ginger and chilli. The fact that the spices are chopped rather than ground gives the gleaming hot sauce a nut- tiness that is a perfect foil for the smooth- textured, bouncy-fleshed kidneys.
Chicken tikka is succulent and smoky; the bhuna gosht a creamy and aromatic blend of lamb, garlic, coriander, onions and yoghurt; the ginger chicken spiky with shards of fresh ginger; and the chick-peas were soft and sweet in their covering of thick onion-soused juices.
The only inhibiting factor on our greed was the slightly oppressive speed with which the waiters seemed to want to clear our plates. They also committed the, in my mind, unforgivable sin of taking away one person's plate while two of us were still eat- ing.
But the food was so good that nothing could make much of a dent in my enthusi- asm. Dinner for the three of us, with half a pint of warm Heineken each and a bottle of fizzy water to share, came to £115, includ- ing service.
Salloo's 62-64 Kinnerton Street, London SW1; tel 071 235 4444/6845
Nigella Lawson
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