Meghna Tandoori

It is not good when your rice has more flavour than your curry.
I had high hopes for Meghna Tandoori.
It is one of about four or five Bengali restaurants in Crouch End — and the only one that serves Bengali dishes.
(The other establishments are standard Anglo-​Indian curry houses.)
Having its own distinctive menu should have been good.
The first sign that things were going downhill were the benches in the booth — which were broken to the point of disrepair and un-​sit-​ability.
We had to change tables not just once but twice before we could find a table both of us could sit on with seating in good repair.
This suggests to me either extreme shortage of funds or extreme penny-​pinching none of which are good in a restaurant.
The pappadam came with two standard sauces out of a jar (mango chutney and lime pickle), some minimally seasoned yogurt and an onion relish made with very old onions. The onions tasted ok.
An onion bhaji was large generously sized and filling. Although fried there was not a drop of grease.
There was also not a drop of flavor.
It was a dough ball and needed extensive doctoring from the sauces that came with the pappadam.
My chicken mint and tamarind chutney from the Bengali side of the menu might just as well have been chicken cubes in whatever green stuff.
You could not have told with your eyes closed what was in the sauce because there was literally nothing to taste.
A vegetable balti (a standard anglo indian dish) was basically vegetables in tomato sauce — but there were a few anise seeds sprinkled here and there to at least give that dish some life.
White rice was actually tasty and improved the flavor of the other dishes.
Servings were generous and prices were cheap.
I am sure somewhere in London is a wonderful Bengali restaurant.
Meghna in Crouch End is not it.

A reasonably priced restaurant on the high street in Crouch End, a nice walk from Highgate Station. The Korma was nicely spiced, the Chicken reasonably tender. Unfortunately I dined here on an insipidly hot evening during the infamous European heatwave of 2012 and the air conditioning was either nonexistent or nonfunctioning.

Went here just before Christmas and enjoyed some pretty good quality food. My only complaint would be that our food came out at different times, so some of us had our main means whilst others did not and even once we all had our mains, we were left waiting for naans. However, it looked as if they were catering for a pretty big event outside of the restaurant as they kept carrying food to a car, so maybe that was why. Oh, Simon Pegg popped in for some takeaway too.