Food reviews

Cinnamon Club

We recently revisited Cinnamon Club for about the fifth time in as many months and felt compelled to tell you just how good this seven-year-old still is. Never mind it being one of London’s top modern Indians, The Cinnamon Club remains one of the capital’s most reliable restaurants – all categories.

Its setting, within The Old Westminster Library, couldn’t be much more beautiful and the place is always buzzing with activity, attracting as it does a dedicated local following that could act like a Who’s Who of the area’s media, business & political crowd.

The cooking, too, is a far cry from your average local curry house. Head chef Vivek Singh honed his trade in India’s Oberoi Hotel group and has always combined a passion for subcontinental flavours with admiration for the skills employed by western chefs like Escoffier, Marco Pierre White and Charlie Trotter. As a result, his cooking may be based on traditional recipes but everything’s always served with a fresh modern twist.

Singh’s real forte is tender tandoor-cooked dishes, in which meats are tenderised in delicious marinades before being grilled to smokey perfection. His charred breast of Anjou squab pigeon with black lentils and layered paratha is the stuff of legend but it still doesn’t beat the starter of thinly sliced tandoori duck breast and papaya salsa, whose beautifully balanced sweetness and spice made for one of the most delicious plates of food we’ve ever eaten.

Among the many other highlights are the vegetable sides. At £5 per small bowl, they’re admittedly expensive, especially as you’re already shelling out around £10 for starters and £20 for mains, but the subtle flavours offered by the likes of the velvety tandoor-roast aubergine ‘crush’ could almost tempt us into vegetarianism.
Such varied cooking does, of course, make for difficult wine matching but take advice from the clued-up team of sommeliers and you’re in for a treat.