In a lot of British restaurants the vegetarian section is short, apologetic and clearly written last. In Desi cooking the opposite is true. The vegetarian side is the deeper, older and frankly more inventive half of the tradition.
Whole regions of India cook almost no meat at all. That is not a restriction anybody is working around. It is centuries of cooks getting very good at making vegetables, pulses and dairy taste like the main event. So our veg menu is the longer half of the menu, and it sells accordingly.
Start with chilli paneer
If you order one thing, order this. Paneer cubes fried until the outside goes properly golden, then tossed hard and fast with peppers, onion and a sharp chilli sauce. It is Indo Chinese rather than traditional Indian, a Kolkata invention, and it is the single most ordered dish we do by some distance.
It wins people over. We have watched it happen from behind the pass more times than we can count.
Then understand the dals
Two on the menu, and they are not versions of each other:
- Dal tadka. Yellow lentils, light, finished with a hissing tadka of garlic and cumin poured over at the end. This is everyday food, the thing you would actually eat at home on a Tuesday.
- Dal makhani. Black urad lentils cooked down for hours with butter and cream until they go dark, glossy and almost sweet. This is a celebration dish. It takes all day and you can taste it.
Order dal makhani with a roti and nothing else and you have had a genuinely great meal.
Do not skip the chaat
Masala peanut chaat sounds like a bar snack and is not. Peanuts with raw onion, tomato, green chilli, coriander and chaat masala, so crunchy, sour, hot and salty at the same time. It resets your palate between richer things, which is exactly its job on a table full of fried food.
What is actually vegan
Plenty of it, and not by accident. Chana masala, rajma masala, dal tadka, jeera rice, garlic rice, papad and the tamarind sauce are all dairy free as we make them. Look for the Ve marker on the menu.
Anything with paneer, cream, butter or yoghurt obviously is not, and dal makhani, sadly for everyone, is built on both butter and cream. There is no version of it that is not.
A veg table that works
For two people: chilli paneer, mix bhajiya, dal makhani, a garlic rice, two rotis and a mango lassi each. Add masala chips if you are hungry. That is a full, proper meal that happens to have no meat in it, and nobody at the table will be thinking about what is missing.
Have a look at the full menu. The veg section is the first one you will hit.