Mahal

This is the tale of another birthday party (not mine on this occasion). Since my friend loves Indian food, we were looking for a good Indian restaurant in central London that we hadn’t tried before … And there weren’t many. A long search on Unilocal led us to Mahal.
Located on Notting Hill Gate, about midway between the stations of Queensway and Notthing Hill Gate, this restaurant will not blow you away … but it does have quite a few positives.
1. The restaurant is quiet … probably too much so. However we visited on a Thursday night which might be the reason for a visible lack of customers.
2. The food is good and is significantly less oily than most Indian restaurants in a similar price range (oil is a cheap and easy way of improving the taste I guess). This made the food taste quite «homely» … Something that I have felt only at Afghan Kitchen.
The kebab platter that I asked for as a starter was a mixed bag … with some being very good while others leaving a lot to be desired. Among the main courses I would recommend the yellow dal and chana masala. The lamb was quiet good too. An useful feature is that they offer half portion of the vegetarian main course dishes. It would be good if they did the same with the meat dishes as it would allow the customers to try out more stuff.
However the service wasn’t upto the mark. They had forgotten my order of wine and had to be reminded of it before I could get my drink.
Mahal might not be a restaurant where I would return very often simply because it’s not in a part of London that I frequent very often. But at ~ £16 per person for a pretty full meal, it’s a steal for those living closer.

A trip to London isn’t complete unless you’ve had a great Indian meal. Came with a group of 8 coworkers and we ordered a bunch of dishes and went family style. This is a homestyle type restaurant that has excellent service and really delicious food.
Pappadoms are great and the chutneys should not be missed. My two faves are the sweet apricot chutney and the spicy picked chutney, but the other two are good too.
Do not miss the Gosht Xacuti — one of my fave dishes of the meal. 21 different ingredients are used to flavor the lamb and it is sooooo delicious.
I’d personally pass on the king prawn dishes if I went again — everything with chicken and lamb was so much better than any of the prawns we had.
The lamb biryani was also delicious — but comes in large portions so don’t overorder like we did!
Special tip: do not eat anything that looks like a green bean. Two of us ate green bean looking things — which turned out to be fire hot peppers. Tears came streaming down my face and I didn’t recover for half an hour. My coworker had to drink a bowl of raita. Beware!
Decent wine selection, and reasonable prices. Five stars all the way!

Nom nom nom! Mahal gets extra bonus points for having unusual chutneys to serve with their popadoms, and for the absolute steal of a vegetarian tasting menu that was about twice as much food as my very hungry husband and I could eat. The okra dish on the veggie menu is especially yummy. They lose a point for inattentive service, and for forgetting our beers for at least 15 minutes. There’s another branch of this restaurant near Edgware Road. Definitely worth checking one of them out if you are in the area.