Indian restaurant review: Farzi Café, Haymarket, London

In this era of backhanders, corruption and fast lanes that enable pubs to, apparently, sell PPE, I feel I have to start this review with a bit of transparency. The owner of Farzi Café, Zorawar Kalra, is an acquaintance of mine and, before they opened in London, I did a whirlwind tour of India sampling Farzis (and some of their many sister restaurants) for a feature.

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The word “farzi” has several definitions, from false to fabulous, but in the realms of the Farzi Café’s concept – “the farzifying” or reinvention of classic Indian dishes – it’s very much the latter. And yes, I understand the eye-rolling that probably met much of that last line, from “concept” to the use of the restaurant’s name as a verb. Believe me, I was right there with you on the cynicism, doubly so when Farzi London originally opened, and the chicken tikka masala came in a tiny red phone box, and the menu was dotted with “takes” on the Scotch egg and shepherd’s pie. And then I ate there… and, like its Indian counterparts, it became easy to overlook the occasional eccentric presentation because the food was fantastic.

There’s a very good reason for this. Zorawar is the son of the late Jiggs Kalra, a man known as the “czar of Indian cuisine” because what Jiggs didn’t know about Indian food could, probably, have been written on a grain of rice. Zorawar explained to me that while he’d told his chefs they could play around with a dish as much as they liked, deconstruct it to the nth degree, do what they hell they wanted to it… but the end result still had to taste like his dad’s recipe. And, as a result, the food was, occasionally, bonkers but, ultimately, blooming delicious.

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It’s a few years down the line now and, particularly post-pandemic, I was intrigued to see how Farzi Café had fared. While the menu is a little pared down – the Anglo/British dishes have gone, I didn’t see a miniature, CTM-stuffed phone box – I was delighted to see that the place was absolutely rammed on a pretty standard Tuesday evening. Part of that reason seems to be their grasp of pre-theatre marketing – very sensible when you’re next door to Only Fools and Horses The Musical at Theatre Royal Haymarket and just over the road from The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty’s Theatre – but, even as curtains went up, there was a decent crowd still present, with more coming in.

As ever, the a la carte menu can be a little spendy – several mains nudge the £30 barrier – but: a) there’s no doubting the quality of ingredients used; and b) there are a couple of set menus that will leave you well fed and not necessarily overdrawn. As we reel away, doggy bag in hand, very content and with enough leftovers for another meal, the silver menu seems like a very sound way to spend £49 per person.

Of the small plates, the zaffrani murg tikka (with its promise of masala cock scratchings to please anyone with a schoolboy’s sense of humour) is great, ditto the Manglorian rava fried prawns, with its excellent foils of smoked tomato chutney and radish pickle. I shall always, however, have a soft spot for Farzi’s dal chawal arancini, a papad-topped twist on the Italian classic, having once looked askance at Zorawar over their presence on the menu. He simply grinned and pointed out that India was a culture that had leftover rice. Well, yeah, when you put it like that…

Mains follow a similar vein of good ingredients, spot on cooking, and unapologetic spicing, the latter suggesting that Jiggs’ influence still holds true. With dishes such as tandoori paneer and mushroom butter masala, double butter dal makhni and nans that glisten with ghee, you might not want to invite your doctor (or, indeed, visit the night before an annual check-up), but hell, it’s worth a few days’ moderation, doubly so in the case of the garlic-heavy, vinegar laced lamb shank vindaloo.