Waterstones is an irritating shop. The Birmingham multi-storey branch has, of course, a very good range of books to choose from and to peruse reasonably peacefully but every time I visit it seems to be becoming more of a coffee house as the area devoted to displaying books is gradually subsumed by chairs and tables where nice middle class socialists can sit and get a free read and generally muck up a book I might want to buy while lingering over the single mug of capuccino they purchased two and half hours ago.
The coffee emporium component of the shop has now spread out to render the food book section, where I like to search out editions telling the story of eating out, an isolated island which to get to one has to clamber over bearded senescent Corbyn-lookalikes reading opportunistically an available free newspaper or grim professional mothers from Moseley or Harborne letting their three or four accompanying children run riot while occasionally trying to answer the kids’ precocious questions on gender fluidity, the classification of flying dinosaurs or what was really involved in hanging, drawing and quartering.
But let us not sink too far into reflections on the usefulness of the modern English middle-class, well-educated but not necessarily any good at anything, and instead reflect that per ardua ad altem I did indeed manage to negotiate the barriers of Waterstones coffee area and find my way to the Food section bookshelves. For once there were a few items that took my fancy, including a couple of wafer-thin volumes, one possibly ‘signed by the author’, by that supremely middle class socialist useful for nothing more than writing fine restaurant reviews (and apparently also making music) which would have ensured that he would have been aboard the fourth and final spaceship carrying the remains of mankind abandoning a doomed earth in the final part of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
So it was that I got my hands on My Dining Hell, such an attractively thin tome that I was unable to resist beginning to read it immediately, and hence, halting only for quite frequent guffaws, I plunged on through the book reading about Rayner’s very worst dining experiences usually in a London dining establishments which, given the prices asked in restaurants there, should have been a lot better.
It isn’t a good idea to be a restaurant to be visited by someone who likes and is expecting good food on the day that the diner has read My Dining Hell if you are not going to live up to expectations and the Indus in the Park Regis Hotel, at the far end of Broad Street near Five Ways was the dining establishment fated to fall foul of such a diner empowered by the little pink book which rendered to the reader the Thoughts of Jay.
The Park Regis Hotel itself is an exquisitely confusingly designed building with the reception being located on the fourth floor and the restaurant seeming to occupy the same space as that area in which hotel guests seem likely to be breakfasting - in short, a flawlessly off-putting cafeteria. When I had finally worked out how to access the ‘restaurant’ I presented myself to a woman who seemed surprised to see me even though I had arrived on time in the early evening, one and half hours after the restaurant’s advertised opening time. There were no other diners though it was admittedly quite early in the evening, albeit a Friday. After some conferring with the manager I was directed to a table with comfortable enough chairs and was able to look around at this soulless area little different from an airport cafeteria on a the day of a long advertised airport workers’ strike.
However the front of house staff were moderately pleasant, a cocktail - a quite reasonable pina colada - was ordered and the menu, slightly grubby and dog-eared and mildly greasy, or was it just waxy?, was presented. An extraordinary document, the likes of which have probably not been seen in a south Asian restaurant before. There was a choice of a fair number of starters which on the look of it seemed surprisingly expensive but the choice of mains was bizarrely inadequate - one seafood, one chicken, one lamb with no choice of sauces plus some vegetarian dishes. This was not looking promising.
I could not bring myself to order any of the starters purely on the basis of their price - if I had thought they were going to be worth it I might have dipped my toe in the water - but I did order poppadoms and pickles which were not modestly priced - £4. I was served a number of poppadom shards and three little pots of the ‘pickles’ - a really unpleasant mint and coriander yogurt dip, a microscopic quantity of really horrible tomato and onion pickle (what a relief the amount served had not been greater) and a more generous helping of ‘home-made’ reasonable-tasting mango chutney (though the menu did not identify in whose ‘home’ the chutney had been made but of course we must assume this all to be true even though the chutney seemed to have no qualities to distinguish it from something which had originated in a supermarket).
My main dish made a fairly rapid appearance on the scene. I had a chosen shahi qasbaar murgh (£16) to be consumed with tandoori butter naan (a robust £4). The glistening, reddish-brown curry looked perfectly reasonable in its metal bowl, the tandoori chicken was very nicely cooked - perfectly moist and tasty - though the sauce did not really better many of the sauces on offer at neighbourhood south Asian establishments sold at a fraction of the price. The naan was a good consistency and would have been very enjoyable had there not been a little more burning on it than was tolerable - I really don’t enjoy the flavour of charcoal. I had indicated that I rather fancied a mango lassi after I had finished my cocktail but no-one came to ask me about it when my glass was drained so the restaurant lost that small amount of business. No-one asked me if I wanted any water but some was delivered to the table when I asked about it and it came nicely chilled.
I thought a sweet dessert might help to cleanse my mouth of the flavour of charcoal. The thing which winged its way to the table was a calamity. I had chosen pistachio ice cream with pecan nut brittle and other random elements including a caramel sauce. This was a real mess and almost entirely inedible. The ice cream was spread out across the middle of the dish centring itself on two inelegant misshapen mounds and was made up of ice cream stuffed with crushed pistachio bits which really had a very unhappy texture and an even worse flavour. The nut brittle was rock hard and far too threatening to the continuing existence of my teeth for me to have more than a tentative first nibble before abandoning the whole as a lost cause. The dessert did however have four sweet small half-strawberries lying on the plate with the rest of it and they were very pleasing though it was a pity that the stuff that shared the plate with them was truly awful.
By the time this nightmare was over two or three couples had sat down to dine in this depressing, characterless dining room. One couple had ordered the immense ‘Indus non-vegetarian platter for two’ of starters priced at £35 and this actually looked rather good and they polished it off and did not seem displeased with it so it is possible that there is something at Indus in which it is worth indulging.
For me however, the bill coming to over £46 (1 drink, 1 main, 1 naan, 1 dessert) this was one of the worst meals I have had and stumped up good money for, in a long time. The hotel’s management has opened a restaurant advertised as a dining establishment of quality but its pretensions are far in advance of what it delivers - the atmosphere is awful and the food does not live up to the prices chance. I fear that I shall not visit the banks of this particular Indus again at any time in the future.
Rating - 0.
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