The Great Indian, London: ‘A thoroughly delightful food pub'

The Great Indian, 139 Marlborough Road, London N19 4NU. Small plates
£7.50-£11.50, large dishes £9.50-£23.50, desserts £6.50, wines from £23, Cobra £6.30
At the top of the menu at the Great Indian, a new and thoroughly delightful food pub in London's Archway, there's a set of slogans of a sort guaranteed to make my teeth itchy. It says things like 'comfy', 'social' and 'vibe dining'. I looked up the last one. Apparently, it means the place is, y'know, nice. We can all get behind nice. It was, however, another phrase that really stood out. It said 'Indian influenced'. The Great Indian is owned by Aman Dhir who already has a takeaway of the same name in Hackney where they serve chicken tikka, seekh kebabs, aloo gobi and the rest. The executive chef here is Surjan Singh, an experienced restaurant consultant from India known there as Chef Jolly and familiar as a judge on MasterChef India. He has been spending time in Archway, alongside his Indian cooks and the Indian front of house team. The charming head waiter who served us had not long arrived in the UK from India.
It speaks volumes about increasing sensitivities around dish origins and cultural appropriation that an entirely Indian team apparently think it wise to open up a little distance between the satisfying and well-executed Indian food they are serving and the mere suggestion that it might actually all be Indian food. Perhaps it's because, among the small plates section of the evening menu, there are gunpowder Buffalo wings, which the pious might allege, with a performative eye-roll, must come from the upstate New York bit of India. Likewise, there's a lamb 'taco roti', which might come from the Mexican part.
These are dainty folds of flaky, buttery roti, each filled with a hefty spoonful of a hot, dry lamb curry, in which the sauce has almost been cooked out to a crust around the meat. These are topped with crispy deep-fried curry leaves and arrive at the table in one of those zigzagged metal trays used to keep hand-sized tacos in one piece. If these were served as canapés at a party, one to which I would very much like an invitation thank you, anyone with good taste would be loitering by the door from the kitchen to get their hands on them as they arrived. Given all the ingredients, this is clearly an Indian dish. To describe it otherwise would be to set weird, po-faced, and arbitrary boundaries around what fits within a culinary tradition and what does not. We all play with our food. Be thankful that we do. The word 'influenced' is happily redundant.
Definitions can still be helpful. The Great Indian is inside what was the Prince Alfred, an old boozer on a north London residential street. It is a restaurant serving Indian food housed in a pub. I believe we call those gastropubs. It is not, however, a Desi pub, like the Yew Tree in Wolverhampton, which I reviewed at the end of last year. A Desi pub is one which happens to have an Indian kitchen, generally serving the local Asian community among others; a place where you genuinely could just go for a quick pint or seven. There is a bar here, a pretty one with a jade-green tiled frontage, boasting a collection of gins, alongside Cobra, Guinness and Neck Oil Session IPA on draft. But the two high-tops for drinking at feel solely like places at which to wait for tables in the abutting dining room, rather than somewhere to pass the night. This isn't a criticism. It's a description.
The ceiling is hung with artificial foliage and there are multilayered rattan lampshades. They care about small things. Start with the spiced poppadoms, which have been smoked and come with a chutney in the colours of the Indian flag. At the bottom there's a date and tomato relish, in the middle, some spiced yoghurt and, on top, of that a dense mess of finely chopped sweet-sour mint. Hilarious amounts of work have gone into this idea, given that digging in with a teaspoon doesn't quite reveal the full beauty of the flag. But it's a great accompaniment and a nice story. Alongside the roti tacos we have their tamarind-rich chaat. It surrounds two flaky vegetable samosas, served warm, which peek out shyly from the crust of fried noodles and pomegranate seeds.
At lunchtime there are thalis at £14.90 built around the likes of butter chicken or tandoori paneer. Or there are bigger dishes priced in the mid-teens, which are proof once more of the power and joy, the depth and profundity, of brown food. The Punjabi lamb curry has a thick gravy the colour of freshly turned London clay, heavy with roasted spice and the sort of acidity that opens everything up. The dal makhani is described as having been simmered for 48 hours and there is a buttery-rich quality to it that suggests they really aren't kidding. Come for the lamb tacos; stay for the lentils. Assume no one is watching and spoon it neat from the bowl. It's cold and raining out there. Yellow weather warnings are in place. This dal will keep any storm at bay
We forgo a side of rice in favour of the chicken biryani, served in its own cast-iron pot. Take off the lid and breathe in the hot waves of cardamom and the sweetness of caramelised onions in among each spice-dusted long grain. Lubricate it with a little of the snowy garlic yoghurt with which it arrives. Or scoop it away with a crisp-crusted naan filled with pickled chillies and stringy cheese, which feels like the sort of thing you might order after a long session down the pub, when boozy appetite is fully in charge, rather than before. That one item shows a particular determination to feed. The sense is very much of a kitchen which, given the price point, is putting its back into the cooking rather more than might be expected.
Desserts are sweet, creamy things. Sliced orbs of syrupy gulab jamun, for example, come on a splodge of rabdi, made by simmering sugar-rich milk with cardamom and saffron until it thickens. It's topped with almonds and pistachios, and serves as a great defence against the miserable, thrashing weather outside. The Great Indian might be a slightly grandstanding name for this newcomer, but it sits comfortably alongside places like the Tamil Prince, only a few miles away, which have helped redefine what the gastropub might be. Doubtless, some locals will feel they've lost an old boozer. They should think, instead, of having gained a great Indian restaurant.
This week's high-profile closure is perhaps less surprising than some. Café Laperouse is an outpost of a Parisian restaurant group which opened here less than two years ago inside the OWO (Old War Office) hotel on London's Whitehall. Now it is shutting its doors. Despite the high prices – main courses topped out at £58 – it was dogged by a one-out-of-five hygiene rating at opening and less than favourable reviews, including from this column.
In better news, chef Livia Alarcon, who cooked up a storm at Queens Bistro in Liverpool, has been announced as the head chef of the Dog and Collar, a new food pub on the city's Hope Street. Alarcon, who is currently representing the northwest on BBC2's Great British Menu, says she intends to 'celebrate British produce in a pub setting, pulling influence and inspiration from the north, my culture and upbringing,' The new pub opens at the end of the month (dogandcollarpub.co.uk).
And news of another chef who made his name in Liverpool. Anton Piotrowski, who won MasterChef; the Professionals before opening the much-admired Roski in the city, is returning to his home town of Lynmouth in Devon. He is taking over the kitchens of the Rising Sun Inn, a 14th-century thatched tavern on the town's harbourside, which he says has long been one of his favourites (risingsunlynmouth.co.uk)
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1

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