I still haven’t quite got to grips with the point of this blog about the restaurant scene in Croydon, and whether I have enough to say about it.
There’s part of me that would like to combine it with a look at some of the development (or otherwise) of Croydon – I did think about going to Trickle after the new pedestrian crossing to the Whitgift Centre opened, for example.
Or maybe a look at Mithras, whilst celebrating the new railings separating the tram and road near East Croydon station that have been installed. Exciting read, huh?
Yet none of those have happened, and I went for a walk up Brighton Road to Saffron Indian Restaurant.
Did I see anything new? Well, they’ve dug up the road and repainted part of the bus stop markings on the floor.
Saffron Indian Restaurant successfully does two of the things that piss me off about restaurants.
Firstly, there is page after page of dishes to choose from – tandoori, balti, chef’s recommendations, biryani, etc etc and oh my it really went on and on. I didn’t take a photograph of the menu but you can see the list online.
That said, there was no point in photographing the menu as I could barely read it – such a small font that I was straining to read it. I probably don’t have the 20/20 vision of my youth, when my mother decided I spent too long on my Sinclair Spectrum ZX and therefore needed glasses (20/20 vision ha ha ha) but this was just hard work.
300+ dishes each of which I struggled to read.
Which might be fine if you are the kind of person who knows what they want and order the same thing every time. I am not. Indian cuisine is so broad given that it is such a huge and varied country, that I feel like I’ve barely touched the sides.
That said, I ended up with chicken tikka for starter. Yes, I’ve had chicken tikka before.
I had ordered one of the prawn dishes, I forget which one now – but they didn’t have it in stock, and under pressure I ordered the chicken tikka.
It was fine. 4 pieces of chicken breast, nicely marinated, well cooked – though not breaking any boundaries. The small stubb of broccoli added some crunch to my starter, the salad more decorative than declarative.
We were having the banquet menu, which I think was £17.95 (maybe give or take a couple of quid, I don’t remember for sure), and offered starter, main, side and bread/rice – which is pretty decent value, assuming you enjoy the food enough.
Is this a roti?
Quite possibly it is – I’m not Indian, but all the roti I’ve had in my life before this were almost more pancake-like in texture, more pillowy to eat. This was more like a flatbread, and a pretty uninteresting (shop-bought?) flatbread.
For side I had ordered the aloo gobi – not the best photograph ever, guess the purple, red and green lighting (who on earth does interior design for Indian restaurants?) wasn’t helping my pretty ordinary Pixel take a photograph:
It was rather on the soft side – one assumes cooked long before (otherwise how can you offer 300 dishes?) – a fairly basic tomato based sauce and some evidence of spices, paprika and turmeric perhaps…not sure what else.
The main dish was at least something new to me – chicken kahari. Apparently kahari is a more north Indian dish, cooked on a hot plate, and tomato-based.
Said tomato was quite sticky and deep, almost a slight burnt taste – though there were tomato chunks too.
Otherwise it continued the pretty ordinary theme – nothing offended my mouth at Saffron Indian Restaurant, but nothing was that interesting. There wasn’t really even any spice going on either.
I can see why people might like Saffron Indian Restaurant (maybe I might just call it Saffron from here on), the service was friendly, the amount of food for the price charged on the banquet menu is impressive, and probably out of 300 or so dishes there is something more interesting than what I had. Probably. Who knows?
But for my tastes, the food was all a bit ordinary.
My rating is a 5.9 out of 10.