Sign up to get Today’s Best Articles in your inbox
Join 350,000+ subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of
The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Indian Accent London restaurant review: acutely excellent
Four years ago, scientists in India undertook an unusual research project, attempting to decode what makes their country's food so popular by analysing it at a molecular level.
Researchers from the Indian Institute for Technology in Jodhpur discovered that unlike Western cooking, which tends to pair similar ingredients, Indian cuisine often brings together flavours with almost no overlap at all.
"We found that average flavour sharing in Indian cuisine was significantly lesser than expected," the researchers said.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
In other words, the more two ingredients share a flavour profile, the less likely they are to co-star in a single Indian dish.
Yet new science is surely called for to determine why the dishes at India Accent are so far ahead of those being served up by many of the restaurant’s high-end Indian peers.
A visit to the restaurant begins simply enough: Indian Accent occupies a handsome though not ostentatious space and offers a menu that is subdivided in more or less the usual fashion, with firsts, seconds, mains, breads, sides and desserts.
This however is where the familiar ends and the excellence begins.
Sign up to get Today’s Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the day’s biggest news and analysis – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Our meal opens with an amuse bouche, a puffy blue cheese-filled naan accompanied by a micro jug of pumpkin and coconut chorba – an understatedly spectacular pairing.
Next up, our starters arrive, with selections well steered by our waiter to accommodate my dining partner’s dietary restrictions.
The tadka hamachi, a subtle sashimi-like dish, served with avocado and Calcutta chutney is beautiful to look at - scattered with pomegranate seeds and edible flowers - but even better to devour. It achieves that rare feat of being simultaneously rich yet light; satiating yet moreish.
Alongside it, meetha achaar pork ribs, basted in sundried mango and onion seeds arrive perfectly tender, their meat falling off the bone. The Wild Boy Chardonay we opt for alongside it all is a citrusy delight, bringing out the best of both meats.
What follows reinforces what has come before - seared scallops and chilli prawns are served with dried shrimp rice, reinvigorating a classic combination through a contemporary lens.
The night’s showstopper, though, is the ghee roast lamb, a nod, surely, to the classic Chinese Peking duck. Here though, gauze-thin roti pancakes stand in for rice paper, and chutney for hoisin.
Like everything on the menu, it is a triumph that I definitely plan to subject to further scientific scrutiny, as I begin plotting my return visit even before I have put down my cutlery and asked for the bill.
Arion McNicoll is a freelance writer at The Week Digital and was previously the UK website’s editor. He has also held senior editorial roles at CNN, The Times and The Sunday Times. Along with his writing work, he co-hosts “Today in History with The Retrospectors”, Rethink Audio’s flagship daily podcast, and is a regular panellist (and occasional stand-in host) on “The Week Unwrapped”. He is also a judge for The Publisher Podcast Awards.
