First a couple of quick thoughts in Burnham on a Friday night, the top end of the High Street is really busy, pub thriving and good buzz about the place...great to see and we are in a double-dip recession apparently!
Akash was a bit of a dilemma : good food, very patchy service and a busy restaurant with a lively crowd of locals in. We felt loved-up as we entered as the warm handshake seemed very welcoming. Sadly it was quickly apparent as the waiter realised we weren't in the big crowd behind us and he stepped straight past us and transferred his warm welcome to the group - we got pointed to a table and asked to sit. It seems booking in advance is a bit of a waste as no one seemed to know!
Akash is definitely aimed at a young clientele and it caters for this in the menu. There were three big tables in and they were busy meeting that order so we rather got forgotten on the edge and the wait between the starters and the main was a rather lengthy wait... 50 minutes between course does help you to digest I suppose.
The food - well, it has to be said it was very tasty and presented well and if you order a hot Jalfrezi or Vindaloo it is pretty damn hot : too many places are serving rather warm rather than hot curries these days so that was refreshing. The normal fayre was good but we would recommend opting for the Chef Specialities because they were definitely the better options.
Naan sadly was a little burnt but tasty enough, the prawns on purée was very good and the Tarka Dall was excellent as portion sizes were good, but our Vindaloo connoisseur was very surprises to find apple in his Vindaloo ... That was a first…
So, all fairly good stuff as restaurants go and then all of a sudden you realise that sitting near the door is disastrous because with a high turnover of tables the constant rearranging of the tables around us to cope with big and small groups coming in was a total pain. So our advice is don't take the front window seat - oh, and that means you also avoid the bright blue up lighters outside the restaurant which light up the front.
But the bill - the big issue - it was cheap, £78 for 4 without a lot of booze admittedly but reasonable none the less. However the hot towels were, well cold actually, and the nice touch of a lolly with the bill is a clever little twist ... We all laughed but ate them!
The big question of course for us is would we go back? Sadly the popular vote is no... The food just doesn't make up for quite slow and lazy service. We just assumed the main task here was catering for local regulars and for that alone pop in visitors like us were a bit too hard work.
Ranking for us was well outside our top 20.
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