Dining in Derbyshire – The Curry Lounge, Somercotes
It was early on a Wednesday evening when we parked on the Market Place in Somercotes adjacent to the familiar restaurant entrance. The welcoming, contemporary designed foyer hadn’t changed but for one addition; in pride-of place, the wall facing the door was adorned with a large ceramic plaque. On it, in bold type, it reads Best Restaurant Awards 2022. The restaurant was awarded the prize for Best Indian & Bangladeshi Restaurant at the Curry Life awards in October last year. Curry Life is a British independent trade magazine for the Bangladeshi and Indian restaurants and takeaways in Great Britain. With over 300 reviews taken in to account the prestigious award was made for their top class food, excellent service and overall customer experience. We made our way into the restaurant and bumped in to Syed Hussain, owner of the Curry Lounge, and congratulated him on his fabulous achievement. Obviously proud of his award he showed us a video on his phone of the ceremony. We were shown to a table for two by the window and started to unpack our drinks. The Curry Lounge doesn’t have a licence to serve alcohol but there’s nothing to stop you bringing your own. There’s something a bit naughty about walking into a restaurant with your own favourite beer or wine clinking in a much used ‘bag for life’. Our waiter provided the appropriate glasses: one wine glass and one for beer. Plus a very essential bottle opener. The menu had several items ‘flagged’ as new and we decided to order one each of the kitchen’s latest creations. We started with pickles and poppadoms; part of the curry meal ritual. A smooth mango chutney, a refreshing chunky tomato salad and spicy dark amber tamarind dip accompanied the two huge poppadoms. Plus a smooth raita that was, at our request, to stay on the table. A platter of onion bhajis was the next course. So often with these little morsels of loveliness there’s too much gram flour and very little onion but these were full of sweet onion. Soft and pillowy in the middle and cracklingly crunchy on the outside. Accompanied with the sauce boat of raita I could have made a meal of them. From one of the new additions to the list of Curry Lounge signature dishes I chose the gulbahar lamb. It’s a mildly spicy dish that was loaded with succulent lamb. The mild sauce was studded with mushrooms, onion and green peppers and a sweet spicy note lingered on the palate. I ordered a bowl of pilau rice to go with the dish. However, when I saw the peshwari naan that Sue had ordered I was tempted to try it with the gulbahar. The naan was warm, soft and overflowed with coconut giving a lovely, slightly sweet flavour to the bread. As it turned out it was a different but perfect accompaniment to the spicy lamb. Susan had ordered special vegetable paneer korai; also on the list of new additions to the Curry Lounge signature dishes. It is a combination of fresh vegetables and paneer (cubed Indian cottage cheese) cooked in a tandoori sauce with onion, peppers and tomatoes and is served in a hot tandoor dish. It’s mid-range spicy and bursting with flavour. The fresh, green vegetables were tender and flavourful. The plain paneer is a perfect vehicle for any sauce but especially delicious when coated with a sauce of tandoor spices and yoghurt. The peshwari naan turned out to be equally delicious with the paneer korai. Next time we’ll skip the rice and order two naans. We’d had a wonderful evening with delicious food, attentive service and the pleasure of trying new dishes. The Curry Lounge, Market Place, Somercotes, Derbyshire. Tel 01773 528 588 00
Taste Derbyshire – The Spice Sisters
When it comes to curry, I adopt a relaxed ‘Jamie Oliver’ approach and simply chop, chuck, dice and drizzle the contents of my entire store cupboard into a pot until I have something runny enough to stick on some rice. I draw the line at using the nine-year-old tin of fruit cocktail. I stopped putting fruit in curry after realising tangerine was no substitute for lemon and that banana curry does not appear on your average takeaway menu for a reason. My husband still goes the colour of an unripe banana at the thought of it, 35 years on. Veena Gost and her spice sister Nilam Wright are behind the Curry on Cooking spice kit – formulated to give British ex-pats their curry fix. They promise that just one masterclass will banish my ‘throw it in and pray’ approach to Indian cooking for good. It was Veena and Nilam’s flair for cooking – and sense of fun – which made them such popular guests at BBQs in the Murcia region of Spain where Nilam and her family now live. Veena and Nilam would take along things like pakoras and bhajis and curry-starved ex-pats would grill them about where to buy the spices. One ‘light bulb’ moment later and sisters came up with the idea for the ‘curry kit’ – a spice mix with ‘no hidden nasties’ (chemicals or colours) which comes stapled to a recipe card. “It was funny we ended up launching a food business as Nilam and I didn’t want to learn anything about cooking as children,” laughs Veena. “My mum is one of the best cooks I have ever come across. The house was always full of people and mum would spend hours preparing a feast inspired by her Northern Indian heritage. Friends and family were always asking mum for recipes but Nilam and I were focussed on education and careers. From the age of nine, I wanted to become a journalist – not a housewife.” Veena says she and Nilam sometimes felt self-conscious about eating different food from their schoolfriends. “Nilam and I were only talking the other day about our trips to Skegness when we’d often be the only Asian family on the beach,” she recalls. “Mum would be up at 5am to make the most amazing picnics. She’d make things like spicy pickles and stuffed parathas but Nilam and I wanted to eat fish and chips like everyone else. Now we appreciate how hard she worked. Spices and other Indian staples were so hard to get in Derby in the 70s – we’d often go to Birmingham or London to stock-up. If anyone offered to bring something from India, mum would ask for something ‘exotic’ like a mango.” Mum’s cooking was the first thing Veena missed after starting work in Southampton; “I lived on Derby Road which is fitting because I was always running to the phone box on the corner to ring home,” she recalls. “If I wanted a make a tarka – which is a mixture of spices fried in ghee or oil – I’d have to ring my mum and she’d talk me through the processes. Mum couldn’t read me a recipe because she has never written anything down. There’s no teaspoon or tablespoons, just a case of a ‘sprinkle of this, a sprinkle of that’.” Whatever she says, an instinct for cooking is in Veena’s DNA. As I begin my chicken curry, Veena whips up ‘the best and quickest’ vegetable side-dish of courgette fried in spices. It’s made before I have time to chop a pepper. But what’s truly fascinating is watching Veena ‘fine-tuning’ the flavour. There’s no recipe or measuring; Veena simply stands over the dish holding her spice tray like an artist’s palette – adding the odd pinch or two – until the masterpiece is complete. Small wonder Veena’s cooking skills were often required when her sister Nilam, husband Darren and son Josh (14), emigrated to Spain in 2009. “After a short time living in Malaysia, they finally settled in Murcia,” Veena explained. “I was working for the BBC at the time but would visit them a few times a year. As spices are hard to get in Spain, I’d have to pack a load in my suitcase. For years, all my holiday clothes smelled of curry. We’d cook Indian food for our ex-pat friends and they’d tell us how much they really missed it. People started asking us to cook dishes for them.” Although the number of Indian restaurants in Spain has increased in the last five years, Veena says they are often too expensive for ex-pats. As for home-cooking, while the Spanish supermarkets and shops stock saffron, paprika and cinnamon; things like coriander, cumin and fenugreek are much harder to get because they are not traditionally used in Spanish dishes. “Inspiration struck while house-sitting for someone who had the most fabulous kitchen. Nilam and I don’t travel anywhere without our spice trays and we couldn’t resist the urge to cook” recalls Veena. “As we started cooking we decided to create a spice mix which could be used by ex-pats to make dishes like Balti and Aloo Gobi. We did little packs of spice, wrote the recipes out in long-hand on a A4 pad and gave them out to our friends for feed-back.” The feed-back was so encouraging, the sisters started to approach traders. “I don’t think the irony hit us at the time but we were Indian girls from Derby looking for ‘English’ corner shops in Spain,” she laughs. “We also gave a korma curry kit and our instructions to all the foodie friends of ours and said we wanted totally honest feedback. One of the most useful comments came from my nephew Josh, who was ten at the time. He did our ‘Bombay potato’ blend and the chunks of potato were far too big and he didn’t wash them. Quite rightly, he said there was nothing about preparing the potatoes in the instructions. We
