| Koyal, Surbiton | | Feb 14, 2025 |
I rarely make any journey without the promise of a nice meal. This applies to short breaks, long-haul holidays and day trips alike - I have no interest in beaches, ski slopes, cruise ships or campsites, and although I'm very partial to a long walk in the countryside when the weather allows, how much better is that long walk with a gastropub lunch at the end of it? Or at the start of it. Or at any point in-between, for that matter.
Plus there is just no point, in this country at least, relying on the weather to enjoy a day out because you have a very good chance of your plans being thwarted. No, what you need is a meal to look forward to because then even if it buckets down or blows a gale you only have to grin and bear it until it's time to eat. And then, of course, if the sun does come out, it's a nice little bonus and an excuse to have a digestif in a pub garden. I think maybe I just like pubs.
Koyal is in Surbiton, and is good enough to be worth a journey from just about anywhere but is particularly attractive for anyone who lives on the South West Trains Waterloo line (waves) and can get there in about 20 minutes flat. Their sister restaurant (or rather one of their sister restaurants), Dastaan, which opened in 2017, is a little more inaccessible by virtue of existing on some strange strip of nowheresville between Epsom and Ewell but has still, through the quality of its food offering, become a destination. I'm hoping - and very much expecting - that the same eventually happens to Koyal which was a bit quiet of a Saturday lunchtime, but as my friend pointed out, only weird food-obsessives like me go for a curry on a Saturday lunchtime. More fool them, I say.
So as the rain and the cold and the wind blew outside, we started - as you always should at high-end Indians - with a selection of papadoms and chutneys. The paps were delicate and grease-free (we particularly liked their little ridged Walkers Max-shaped crisps) and the chutneys - a smooth and tangy mango, and a deeply vegetal and gently chillified coriander - were both excellent.
Full marks to Koyal for the generous size of their pani puri, and bonus points for the flavour of them which brought in a beguiling range of flavours and textures from earthy, creamy potatoes to interesting tropical notes of pineapple and kiwi to buttery chickpea. But sometimes you can be too generous - the fist-size dimensions made them impossible to eat in the usual one dainty bite, and I don't know if you've ever tried to eat half a pastry casing filled with liquid but it tends to get quite messy. Great fun though, and as I say, impeccable otherwise.
Stone bass tikka is a dish - or variant thereof - that has appeared on many a high-end Indian restaurant menu in London over recent years, and whenever it is done well (tip: it's always done well, at least in my experience) becomes an absolute must-order. Unfortunately, this kind of advice is a bit useless at a restaurant like Koyal where more or less everything could be described as a must-order, so I'll just say that these bits of fish, brilliantly and boldly spiced, grilled delicately over coals and with crisped-up, gently fatty skin attached, were utterly perfect.
Lamb chops were similarly strikingly spiced and cleverly grilled, with just enough of the heat to give crunch but soft and yielding on the bite. And again, they were pretty much unimprovable. I know that some places go for a thicker cut on the chops so they can get a pink middle, but then those places also end up charging £20+ a chop, and sometimes you want to leave a bit of room for the rest of the menu.
What arrived next was one of those dishes that shoots straight into every single pleasure point of my brain and will stay there until the day I die. If Devon Crab Butter Garlic Masala sounds good on paper, then believe me, nothing will prepare you for the reality, a bowl of white crab meat bound with butter and spices that should in a sane world be too much - too rich, too powerfully flavoured, too heavy - and yet somehow conspires to be one of the great seafood dishes. I don't know how you'd even come up with a thing like this, never mind make it work, and yet here we are. The year it takes off your life with every scoop of the dill naan is worth it. It really is that good.
I could have left by now and died happy - a literal possibility after that butter crab - but there was one more glorious thing to enjoy. Wild boar in toddy vinegar showed the ex-Gymkhana chefs could still show a bit of game a good time, chunks of lovely soft slow-cooked meat in a spiced tomato sauce. With it, a neat bowl of saffron rice which we nearly managed to finish. I mean, come on, we did well, didn't we? Credit where credit's due.
Before I show you the bill, I do want to point out that the two of us managed to polish off a bottle of rather nice Viognier each (it was that kind of Saturday - we ended up in a tiki bar in Clapham Junction not long after) and so a more realistic price per person might be something like £70pp if you just had a beer each rather than the £112pp we conspired to rack up. But it's important to recognise that the wine list at Koyal starts at £30 a bottle, a very reasonable £8 a glass and on top of that they only ask for 10% service charge. The contrast with certain recent reviews could not be more stark.
So thank you, Koyal, for one of the best meals I can remember in many years. I enjoyed it so much in fact that I have booked Dastaan Leeds next month to coincide with a work trip up north, which I thoroughly expect to be just as stupidly good. Alongside Black Salt in Cheen (reviewed here back in 2022), also from the same team, and the aforementioned spot in Epsom/Ewell, it provides yet more evidence that London is perhaps the best place in the world for Indian food outside of India - and (whisper it), according to some people in the know, including India itself... but that's a discussion for another time. For now, just enjoy what we have, and enjoy it as much as you can. We really have never had it so good.
10/10 | | | |
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