2013 Lord Mayor's Big Curry Lunch - Big Curry - if you are in The City please support

Last year this great event managed to help raise over £230,000 for a great support charity for soldiers and happy to say they are repeating the lunch this year at the Guildhall in The City of London...if you can please do support...great way to get a great curry too...ABF Soldiers Charity will be very appreciative. It is on Thursday 18th April 2013. For more information here is the website http://bigcurry.org/events/lordmayor

New Beginnings...

After a few months break the FFCC is up and running again we are off in a slightly different direction... no One Direction for us!

We have decided to split the organising around members and hopefully this will add some new venues and types along the way as well as give everyone a piece of the decisions on where and when to go... Looking forward to it.

Tom is in the Captain seat this April - Marlow the venue back in to the Tiger Club (no mention of the toilets please Ed!) Watch the Twitter feed for updates and the reappraisal of this fine wee curry house we last visited a couple of years back. Should be a blast... probably starting out in the Prince of Wales around the corner. Looking forward to it great to be back in the proverbial saddle.

Mid Week Buffet

Decided to pop in and try the mid week buffet at The Ocean Village on Bridge Street in Maidenhead last night with two friends.

Now we believe at the FFCC that what you pay is not an indicator of quality when it comes to curry and so an offer of £6 cash only for a buffet we were optimistic.

Sadly it was not to be - the food was not bad it was perfectly fine but just very very bland flavouring. Which was a shame.

These guys are always friendly and polite and welcoming and we have eaten here before with mixed results and last night was more of the same.

Choice of starters, samosa, bhaji, chicken tikka and spices all very ordinary: mains was a choice of three curries, two chicken and one lamb all with tender meat but again just very bland, making food as bland as this is crime... We are sure locals will throw their arms up in outcry but thus is very bland ordinary curry and these guys can do so much better.

Won't be trying the mid week buffet again a definite 4/10. .

Ouch! The hottest curry

We have been talking amongst ourselves a lot recently about the Scoville Scale - Nagas & Scotch Bonnets and all thing chilli related when we came across this!

Bless the Daily Mail.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2257120/Doctor-eats-curry-hot-known-The-Widower-chefs-making-wear-goggles-face-mask.html

Ed - sounds like one for you.

James Isherwood & Blogging about food

There once was a man... who dared to blog about food and wasn't a 'expert' - here is the story (Oh, and beware the language in here is a little fruity!)


http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2012/nov/08/top-chefs-unite-against-blogger-s-review

As foody-bloggers - the Isherwood story is a worrying one for anyone with an opinion.  We have, over the years of writing about curry, been contacted by a few curry house owners who didn't like what was written.

Very occasionally there have been little legal threats but they never materialise because ordinary people writing about their experience and then letting others know is not something to be afraid of if you own a restaurant but something to learn from.  Listening to customers who experience your products & services are valuable inputs to making you more money in the future. Listen to them - it can make you a better restaurant and a far more profitable one.

Pub Curries

In recent weeks because of both work and being out and about around the country I have had chance to sample a lot curry in pubs rather than traditional (as I call them) curry houses. I have learnt I think the three big trends for pub curries.

There are it strikes me three types:

1. Slop - far too many pubs get away with a basically mild brown indeterminent meat based slop that gets called curry. It invariably isn't hot, it normally tastes old as it is clearly coming from a big pot somewhere. But importantly it comes with rice which is normally stodgy. The way to avoid these is they are normally merely described as Lamb/ beef curry...avoid. this really is just cashing in on curry being a popular dish and wanting orders for mild rubbish.

2. Faux Curry - or fake curry which ever you prefer. This is slightly better than slop as the neat contained within is normal more 'meat' looking and again they are always brown. Faux curry is more related to lumpy gravy or the emptied out content of a pie than to a real curry. The clue to this stuff is they normally offer a poppadom with it to add authenticity but it doesn't and it frequently gets called balti which in places it is served normally means you get the rice and 'curry' in different bowls - these curries tend to get called Rogan Gosh because it sounds inoffensive the uninitiated. The clue here is avoiding anything described as rogan !

3. Made to order - one in 10 curries in pubs are actually made...not just pulled from a big pot. Many obviously are made for serving say 10 and then they have to make a fresh batch. Good normally and often un pretentious fayre...these curries are good tastey and normally chicken. The clue here is always ask if freshly made... and invariably they are described as hotter than normal because getting a consistent heat is tough so they warn people.

Anyway those are my musings after the recent foray into the dark and shadowy world of pub curry.

If you want a good example of a fresh made curry in these parts you won't go better than The Guardsmans Inn curry Wednesday in Maidenhead on Green fell Road.

Really, this is just for the record....regular readers.

For our regular readers we aren't getting together this month...November is always a little strange month because of that chap Guido Fawke messing around with Parliament all those years ago and you know we British love a good firework display....

But in reminising with an old friend recently we got into a discussion about how curry houses cope with larger groups after our entry abput Wargrave recently...ie not handling larger groups too well.

His theory is that 6 is the maximum your shpuld take to a curry outing because above that orders go wrong, bills get added up wrong and it is plain hard to chat as the table gets too big. You see tjis is the kind of important discussion FFCC members get inthralled by!

What is your experience with big numbers of eaters?

November Gathering...

We couldn't get into the originally planned visit to the Spice Oven in Caversham and because Mr Earl, has been talking for a while now about Dedworth Road we are relenting and heading Windsor way for our gathering in November.

http://www.thebinoyindiancuisine.co.uk/how-to-find-us

On www.tripadvisor.co.uk this outlet has got two reviews of this place and they seem to think it is a hidden gem in Windsor...so who are we to complain eh? Yes I know the picture is not very appetising but we have been to worse...

Let's meet a little earlier that normal at 7:30pm and see if we can meet in the pub down the road called The Queen which is one of three and not to be confused with the Black Horse which is just down the road... so for your satnavs...here is the address 282  Dedworth Road... SL4 4JR

This time last year - 2011

Thanks to those lovely software engineers at TimeHop I am able to tell where the FFCC gathered last year at this time last year... We were at The Ivy in Sonning High Street.

Friendly staff - and also cleverly a staff that adapted to our party size and suggested sharing dishes. (See our Wargrave post!) Good food and lousy parking but there is a lovely pub very nearby.

We liked the Ivy a lot.

8th Annual British Curry Awards

This November 26th will see the 8th Annual British Curry Awards where curry lovers, commentators, journalists and suppliers are gathering to celebrate a major industry in the UK - curry is a £3.5Bn business area.   I never knew either!?  Battersea Evolution is the venue, places & tables (we think) are still available for those wanting to go along to a glittering night check out the website... http://www.britishcurryaward.co.uk/index.html The FFCC will of course be there.

Wargrave Wonder & iPads - small must adapt though

OK, I know we took a risk having a curry in Wargrave but  it has to be said parking & Wargrave just don't go together !

Where do these people park??

Anyway moving on ...! this curry house is a bit or an enigma...we have tried to go here since, err... Well since before it was called The Grand Turmeric actually. We tried (and failed) even  to get a table when it was called The Curry Leaf and once, we did actually book a table and when we all rolled up, only to find it had closed for business the week before.

So actually getting in, albeit with different owners, and a new name still feels like an achievement. Even now booking does actually means waiting till they open around 6pm to even be able to book a table. They do have an answer phone but ignore the message they don't call you back!

The plan was to meet in the White Hart on the High Street (a proper pub not like the posher and frankly sterile St George & Dragon with precipitous car park The River Thames ominously beckoning your car  in or is that just me?)) for a pint ...

Strangely the Hart was a bit quiet with a few 'ex-TV people' in and all loudly talking about 1970s TV programming (Thames TV? whatever happened to you?), but the monsoon outside was probably keeping people indoors, or just the lack of Wargrave parking! ...

Then stage 2 of The Plan for the night was to wander along to the impressively named Grand Turmeric. I am not totally sure but I think this place is owned by a bigger curry house chain.. But the website was a bit vague.. But the hint of a central booking service suggests it might be.

It is however a small place with limited parking and a upmarket feel ... Somehow very fitting for POSH Wargrave - I am sure the rowing club approves... It fits well in the target demographic as the marketing experts would say.

It is shall we same small and cosy inside, you definitely could feel you were sitting a little too close to other tables is you ask us. But as we were a noises crowd I felt bad for the locals out for a quite meal...you don't want a loud bunch of chaps in that night I guess.

But this curry house is a first for the FFCC - this is the first place we have ever had our order taken on an iPad - I suppose we will see more of that soon.  It didn't seem to either

1) speed things up - took 45 minutes to get our starters, or
2) improve accuracy they messed up 3 orders out of 8....! C'Mon guys!!

The food is not standard it has lovely twists being sweeter in general and creamier than many curry houses and to be honest there isn't a massive choice, when it arrives it looks good though, portion size are shall we say.... respectable bit not large quantities ...

On little pointer - the menu is all rather confused...leaving you never really knowing if you need side dishes, or  if you need additional rice etc and the waiter serving us offered no advice... Could be why Tom ended up with a Naan style bread and a mainly potato based main course... To his surprise!

The food  does looks hand made and not churned from pots but in that lies the problem. Small restaurants like this suffers to cope when 8 guys turn up because they aren't geared up for large orders better aimed at couples so you always suffer if you are in bigger groups, and in our experience many restaurants don't change how they operate to cope with the clientele in that evening. Lesson to all curry houses out there we would say.  The GT suffered here, they want to deliver everything at the same time so someone's starter clearly is sitting around for a long time while they carefully prepare the rest...Hmmm suggest you need more than one chef?

The people are friendly but almost too reserved they could 'sell' the food more as some is scrumptious but our scores reflected the problem with small restaurants and large groups scale just stumps them.

Scores on her night :

Ed - 6.5
Juan - 6
Nick - 7
Gavin - 5.5
Ian - 6
James - 6
Tom - 4
Pete - 7

With an overall 6 this puts TGT in the low twenties on our lists now. A good little restaurant really, but not enough attention to detail drop the iPad and get the orders right is our tip.

Good place for a couples night out though e would say.

Travelling members!

What is missing from this picture - exactly there is no curry on the table! (Tut Tut...)

The Next Gathering....Wargrave

Right... finally The Grand Turmeric in Wargrave has got its act together and is open... after renaming itself from the Curry Leaf & and the Lemon something... so at last we can visit for our next gathering in October. As you can see they have done a rather nice job of the place... only problem is they seem to have forgotten to add any parking spaces...?  Here is the website...in case you need it.

http://www.theturmeric.co.uk/

However we have a plan...

If we meet in the lovely local pub we can park in their massive car park around the back...so we are going to meet about 8pm at the....White Hart across the road in Wargrave High Street then problem solved.

All reports suggest that the Turmeric is not your everyday common or garden curry house offering more delicate dishes and not swathes of sause hiding the meat... so fingers crossed they live up to it.

Everyone in ?

(PS : yes I know they look similar in the pictures...white paint was popular once remember!)

Ocean Village 2 (revisited)

Our regular readers will know that the Ocean Village in Maidenhead heading out toward the bridge to Slough has gone down in FFCC history as officially the worst curry house we had been too.

We caught them on a bad night when the food was iffy and the service worse and pretty unanimous condemnation followed.

But they say time is a healer, and in fairness to the owners a few take aways from there have been fine - so bravery took us over and we decides 5 years after our first encounter we would revisit.

Meeting just along the road at The Guardsmans Inn (which incidentally does a great curry & a pint nights on Wednesday!) we only had a stumble to the curry shop.

I feel sorry for the Ocean Village, the owner is a lovely chap and he has a set of flats across the road (75% sold proudly announced outside) he should be full of customers but last Friday he was struggling. The England v Moldova game on the telly was clearly hitting the custom.

We arrived with only 2 people in having a quite semi-romantic night out (no romance after a curry eh!) and the ambiance was well flat... He wasn't even playing any music.

Eating in a library was never going to be entertaining, but we ploughed on... The immortal question "what is your speciality?" was met with that ridiculous response that curry house so frequently use "It is all special!" made me think of the lead Indian character in the The Best Marigold Hotel movie - optimistic in the extreme...!

The Ocean Village is a strange place because it is one of those places that if you choose well you get great food if you choose wrong you get bland tasteless food that leaves you thinking that a Waitrose Curry for one would have been a far better idea. Which is exactly what we experienced a mix bag of surprise and apathy towards the food.

The tip from us would be stick to the 'meat' (hopefully lamb) curries and avoid the chicken (bland) and fish (tasteless) the mix starter is however well worth having as you get a sample of the best and it was all tasty.

This place does at least do hot curry so many places nowadays don't offer truly tasty hot curry - not all that macho crap of give me a Vindaloo but just bein able to turn out a curry hotter and tastier than your average. So many places are taming down their heat we find. My advice is try the Jalfrezi Lamb - nice and spicy and great tender meat.

The ambiance did bring the mood down a bit but the price is something you simply can't knock this place on as it was £25 a head with booze in so very reasonable I think you would agree.

How do we sum up The Ocean Village - they are nice people, the food is decent and occasionally good it just isn't a very special place, there just isn't anything to make it stand out nothing you put your finger on and say - that's great but it is not awful and it is no longer worthy of the damning we originally gave it.

25 years in business this year and that says something, you can get by with decent offerings - but in the world of curry things have moved on so much will it survive another 25 like this?

Would we go back - yes in 5 more years. The all important scores - from the 6 people there...

Juan 6
Gavin 6
Ian 7
Rob 7
Nick 7
Pete 7

Website : http://www.oceanvillageuk.com/

CAMRA Campaign

I know our little curry club is mixed beer, wine & diet coke (though it shames us all to admit that!) drinkers but... we still think curry & beer goes together like … err… well beer & curry just does so we are supporting this campaign and signing the e-petition. And we think you should too.... We don't normally get political but this is something worth fight for… BEER!
Check out this link below: copy to your browser and sign up…

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/29664

Of course some bills....are bigger than others!

Of course some bills after the curry are worse than others…!

Akash Tandoori - Burnham

We popped over the Burnham this evening to the Akash Tandoori...

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.

Bit of a screw up ....

There were plans laid to meet this evening as we moved the 6th gathering.

But stupidly Ed's Karen and Mrs Chairman arranged a singing event at Bray Cricket Club ! So we have a challenge. Do both FFCC and Singalong  and stay married or drop out if one or other with expected consequences....

Here is a suggestion as Gavin, Ian, Tom and Clive can't make it.... meet at the Guardsmans Inn for an individual curry and then pop along to watch relatives sing a bit and have another pint.

All comments and thoughts welcome and apologies for tardy administrations skills  at FFCC HQ.

Zaman in Datchet... worth the drive.

June's get together was of course one of our occasional second week of the month gatherings...because the Queen's Jubilee Celebrations the week before (and of course several members had to attend festivities!) meant getting together at the start of the month was impossible.

We met up at the Royal Stag in Datchet... a buzzy pub we have been to before which serves a rather with a weird pint of Windsor Knot ...way too hoppy for our tastes!  But crowded and good to see the place thriving...

The Zaman was recommended (actually by the same friend of Ed's who recommended the place in Denham from a month or so ago and so hope were high)  and we were not disappointed..excellent food, and very reasonable prices made the trip outside our normal hunting grounds around Maidenhead... mind you always gets off to a good start with some free Pakora to get us in the mood while choosing.

First the ambiance...nice sized convenient car park for a change; beginning to realise that everyone wants a decent place to park more curry houses could take note here.  Top marks.  The interior is spaced out and gives a feel of a big room; which is good if the place is buzzing but it was quite quiet so for us it felt a little empty.  The food - typical fair but a few nice twists : stick to Chef's Specialities and you get a better mix, but the ordinary Madras was very good.  The starters we good sized portions and the Kind Prawn Puri was a popular choice.  But there was an interesting twist with a very hot tikka available too...which was out of the ordinary...but in fairness really only as hot as the Madras.  We did praise this place for the sundries - great Naan bread and Tarka Dal were excellent.

The bill - frankly very surprising as Zaman turned out to be very reasonable indeed with the bill including being only £31 a head for a good big meal and friendly service. Would we go back : Yes... Is the drive over to Datchet worth it: definitely.

Next month The Binoy in Dedworth Road?

Euro 2012 - England v Sweden

Here is an idea chaps... with the Euro 2012 competition upon us and suggestions last night at Zaman Tandoori gathering we thought a special gathering of the FFCC would be a good idea...

So the plan is to gather at the famous (Camra Publican of the Year -  pub The Guardsmans Inn, Maidenhead) on the evening of the 15th for the England v Sweden game and watch on the big screen there.

The deal is an individual curry and a pint included for £10 and watch the game - of course you get the fun of a crowd and don't have to watch it on your own at home with the Mrs wanting to watch something else!  But the offer is open to all partners and siblings too so why not make an evening of it?  Who fancies it - either email the Chairman or leave a comment here to let  us know...