David Baddiel: ‘This is the Curry God’s home temple’

Photographs by Sophia Evans

But curry saved my culinary life. The first ever restaurant I went to, in north London, was the Shabag – called, by my dad, unfortunately, the Shagbag – on Rosslyn Hill. To my teenage taste buds, it was a kind of salvation. Because – and I know this goes against the Jewish mother stereotype, but she did in so many ways – Sarah Baddiel was a terrible cook. Her signature dish, traditionally enough, chicken soup, involved leaving an enormous vat of water on the stove for three days into which she would throw some giblets and the occasional claw. All other food was just wildly overcooked. A steak burnt to a crisp would be doing it tartare; by the time she got to medium rare, it was as hard as a housebrick.

So it was revelatory to discover that food could be something other than dry: spicy, full of heat, sometimes so hot it caused pain, but still moist. And I remain loyal to curry, for that revelation, which is why I was very happy to lunch at Darjeeling Express, a central London restaurant that has become something of an Indian food institution in recent years. It’s on the top floor of Kingly Court, an enclave of exciting eateries off Kingly Street.

Darjeeling Express suggests by its name a romantic idea of India and this the restaurant delivers. The décor is a symphony, or maybe better a raga, of gold, brown and blue, mixing the diffuse light of a Calcuttan magic hour with the azure of old Indian train stations. There are handcrafted wall tiles and hanging greenery and antique pottery and dark wood everywhere. It’s all incredibly tasteful, more Jewel in the Crown than It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. It feels like it doesn’t have a problem with the colonial element of India’s past and, indeed, the day before I went, King Charles and Queen Camilla were there, helping to pack dates in boxes for Ramadan, in front of the all-female open kitchen.

All very fancy and nice but, frankly, if the curry’s good, I’ll eat it in a lay-by off the A30. I tend to judge the food at Indian restaurants by the quality of the drinks. By which I don’t mean the alcoholic options – in case you’re worried, they have many cocktails (one is named Minty Scorch who, I’m fairly sure, appeared in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) – but the lassis. I pride myself on being able to gauge what level of delights are in store in any Indian diner by the creaminess of their yoghurt smoothies. I order a cumin and green chilli lassi. Poking out of this creamy pinkness, umbrella-like, is a sharp stalk of something green, which as I take the first sip gets stuck in my eye. However, the pain is assuaged by this being the best lassi I’ve ever had. The chilli burns beautifully against the velvet smoothness of the yoghurt, underpinned by the cumin whispering through the drink like a spice trail. I immediately order another one, like some sort of lassiholic.

Spurred on by the success of the pre-prandials, we – meaning myself and my guest (the director, comedian and doppelgänger for long-lost British filmmaker Harauld Hughes) Richard Ayoade – over-order.

Normally, I never have starters in a curry house, but here we go big on the small plates, which turn out to be not that small. Our waitress has already hinted that we might need a bigger table, and stomachs, when enough bihari phulkis – a street snack, lentil fritters with tamarind – arrive to feed a street. These are joined by four quarters of chicken butter masala toastie, which is what it sounds like: butter chicken that’s been, basically, Brevilled (for younger readers, Google “ultimate deep-fill toastie”). It’s delicious, but afterwards… well, if you’ve ever thought, “Oh dear I’ve overdone it on the poppadums and mango chutney before the main course arrived”, multiply that feeling by 10.

First to arrive is the kosha mangsho, a “slow cooked meat curry in a thick clingy gravy”, a menu description that led to some friction earlier between me and Richard as he is put off by “clingy” whereas I am more than fine with it for saucy food, if not saucy new partners. Indeed, one of the great things about this dish is the way the sauce holds the falling-off-the-bone mutton in its fiery, aromatic grasp, rather than just washing off it, like thin, watery curries do. This shares its Bengali roots with a prawn malaikari, a bright-yellow coconut-cream soup in which five or six curls of seafood are swimming. It’s at the korma end of things, which is not my jam, but the prawns are beautifully rendered, firm and then soft to the bite, like they should be.

Three more dishes hover precariously on the very edges of the table: a kachumbar salad – a pomegranate, tomato and cucumber mix, which Richard has sensibly ordered as a palate cleanser; a badami baingan, aubergine, very brown, good but suffering a bit from how full I am by the time I get to it; and coming in at the end and nearly winning the day like a late bombshell on Love Island, a mirchi ka salaan. Because in Urdu “mirchi” means chillies and “salaan” means curry. Yes it’s got coconuts and peanuts and tamarind in it, but it’s basically chilli curry: the ur-curry, the taste that saved me. It’s extremely hot, right on the edge between pleasure and pain, and thus perfect.

Oh Lordy, I’ve run out of time to tell you about the puddings, again something I never normally have with a curry, beyond After Eights, which never taste as good anywhere else as they do on a side plate with the bill after Indian food. Basically, it was some stewed apricots. I exited the restaurant on a stretcher (no I didn’t, but should have done), once more thanking the Curry God, whose home temple is at Darjeeling Express, for taking me so far away from my mother’s chicken soup.

Darjeeling Express, Top floor, Kingly Court, London W1B 5PW (020 3375 3772; darjeeling-express.com). Set dinner £65, wine from £39

David Baddiel’s My Family: The Memoir is out in paperback