Café Spice Namasté

Café Spice Namasté

Café Spice Namasté is an Award Winning Indian Restaurant near the Tower of London owned by Celebrity Chef Cyrus Todiwala OBE and his wife Pervin Todiwala.

Café Spice Namasté, Indian Restaurant, Cyrus Todiwala

http://www.cafespice.co.uk

Reviews and related sites

Café Spice Namaste - London Restaurant Reviews | Hardens

“Every mouthful is a joy”, say fans of Cyrus Todiwala’s “airy and bright” (somewhat “eccentrically decorated”) City-fringe Indian, where “extremely attentive service” is a hallmark, and where “the man himself usually does the rounds in a clubbable fashion”.

The “wide variety of unusual Parsi dishes” – “quite different food to standard Indian fare” – “are spicy rather than just hot (though you can have that too)”.

Cafe Spice Namaste restaurant review 2013 May London | Indian ...

Review analysis
food  

Pork vindaloo was the best dish of the meal, pieces of English pork in a nicely sour, spicy vinegared sauce (13/20).

The pooris were crisp but I found the topping rather bland, tasting mainly of potato and sev, with not enough tamarind, which if there had been more of it would have been the ideal way to enliven the dish; also, personally I would have liked the spicing dialled up a notch.

It is nice to see the restaurant still prospering, but I still yearn for the days when Cyrus was cooking all the food himself in the tiny premises of Namaste in nearby Alie Street; at that time his kitchen was producing perhaps the best Indian food in London, and of course it is unrealistic to expect this quality to scale up to the the larger kitchen of premises of Café Spice Namaste where there is a team cooking.

Aloo papri chat was a rather inferior version: a mound of heavy potato with rather sharp raw onion and deep-fried “pasta” pieces served with a tiny dish of yoghurt-based sauce with a dash of mint and tamarind.

Bombay potato, always a good test of an Indian kitchen, were reasonable but fell in to the common trap of overcooking the potatoes, resulting in the vegetables losing distinct texture and being too soft on the outside, yet the larger ones were still hard on the inside (10/20).

Café Spice Namaste | Restaurants in Aldgate, London

Review analysis
food  

Chef-patron Cyrus Todiwala is credited with popularising Goan dishes in London and also with bringing genuine Persian-inspired Parsi classics to the city’s restaurant scene.

And though we appreciated the fiery heat of a crisp puff-pastry pasty filled with fried chicken livers cloaked in a ginger-shallot masala, the accompanying pool of sweet and sour turmeric-hued cream described as ‘Goan curry sauce’ did the dish no favours.

More of this yellow sauce partnered a passable rice pilau studded with chopped garlicky sausages in a piquant chilli masala.

And as if we hadn’t had our fill, the same sauce morphed into the masala in a king prawn curry.

Todiwala is one half of the duo featured in BBC TV series The Incredible Spice Men, and his restaurant has become a hit with fans of the series as well as tourists and City business diners.

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