Mela

I’m really going to give props to this restaurant. I walked into the restaurant 10 minutes before the kitchen closed, and they seated me quickly and gave me time to browse the menu and order. I was starving and the other open options were terrible, so this was equivalent to finding an oasis in the desert for me.
The décor of the restaurant is on the upscale side. This is the type of place to take your mom and dad for a nice dinner. The service is also very attentive and quick, which seems to be a rare find in this area.
I ordered the chicken tikka, a watermelon cooler, chicken korma, vegetable samosas, and naan. The food was delicious and generally well prepared. The only problem I had was the chicken was a little overcooked (dry), but not inedible. The samosas in particular were done very well.

Awesome service and great Indian food. Just what I was looking for while staying in London. A bit far from everything but extremely worth the walk.

The food at mela has gone down hill.
The portions are measly and prices are exorbitant. Go to Dishoom.

The staff is very kind and offers great advise. Their 2 course meal is worth it. The restaurant is a larger size than most in the area, but oddly enough it’s not crowded. The at home feeling makes it enjoyable and comfortable. I would absolutely recommend this place to others.

Good chicken tikka masala, within walking distance of many West End theaters. Reasonably priced. The mint yogurt sauce didn’t taste quite right which is why this is only a 3 star for me. Nice service but had a very small order — eating solo — and waiter forgot my mint yogurt sauce — was delivered compliments of the house at tail end of meal when I saw a waiter again and asked for it to be taken off my check.

Food is a solid 4. Service is a solid 2. Hence they get a 3. This is traditional North Indian cuisine and it was all pretty good, but definitely not the best. The service was extremely slow and disjointed. The staff is not coordinated and the kitchen appears under staffed.

We kept it simple and ordered garlic naan, chicken tikka masala, saag paneer and rice, and the food was delicious, flavorful, and just what we needed after a long day out.

First time in London and had recommendations for this restaurant by a friend who used to live here.
Food was delicious, and the naan was the best garlic nana I ever had.
However, and this seems to be a constant for this place, lack of service. The manager greeted me immediately, but made a face when I said I was going to eat alone. Then I asked tap water AND sparkling water, and he made another face and asked me: «really»???
They lose one star for that!
Food is one of the best Indian I ever had, but the staff, specially the manager need to work on their people’s skills…

I waited for 15 minutes at the reception no one attended. I saw staff chatting amongst themselves and laughing off at the back.

We chose to come here first because it was on a ‘top’ list for having great Indian food. We then found up that there was a 50% discount and we could book online. Great.
We had a good meal and drinks even though service was slow. The scam happened when we got the check. We were charged full price and a 12% service charge, even though we told the maitre d’ we had booked with a 50%discount. We showed the waitress the coupon which said only VAT tax and service were not included. She said we had to both order an appetizer and a main course, but we couldn’t have ordered a chef special. We showed her that none of that was on the coupon. We also said we both ordered the papad which should count as two appetizers, but she said that didnt count even though it was on the list of appetizers just because it was papad. What?! She then said she’d talked to her ‘manager’.
Manager comes out and says the same thing. We ask him to show us on the website where it says all this. He goes to his computer in the corner and gets two of his other people over where he whispers in their ear while looks at us. My guess is that they rewrote the coupon. 15 min later one of the ree guys came over with a new coupon that said all of this that looked identical to ours, just with more words.
We told him we saw him write it and he just walked away. A fifth person came by 15 more min later and asked us for our card as if nothing had happened. At this point we were so fed up we just had the ‘discretionary service tax’ removed and paid. It’s such a shame because their food is really good. They don’t need to scam people with coupons to get people in the door. DO NOT GO HERE, terrible experience.

Their slogan is «The Joy of Indian Dining.» There are tons of Indian restaurants in the London area.
This one has an upscale type of vibe.
We had some chai tea.
Then we ordered the Saag Paneer, which is cheese cooked with fresh spinach. It was good, but very spicy. I enjoyed it, but it was too spicy for G. It was 7.95 pounds.
We also split an order of Kulcha naan stuffed with lamb. It was good, but unfortunately, the lamb came out on first bite.
I enjoyed the meal, but it is spicy. The service is also really good. They also gave us a ½ coupon for our next visit. However, we didn’t want to duplicate restaurants since we were only there for a week.

The food here was delicious, but the service was shite. I know they had a large party behind us, but we waited over 40 mins just to get our meal. Once we expressed our concern at 30 mins, they said it was becasue we had one tandori dish ordered. We asked if they could bring us the rest of our order and they said they could bring papadons. We didnt want crackers, we wanted our Tikki Masala!
After that, they stopped coming to check on us completely! Our waters ran dry and we had NO FOOD except the delicious smell from other diners. The waiter avoided eye contact wen we saw them bringing food (same stuff we ordered) to the tables beside us (who were not part of the big party).
When the food finally arrived, they had missed one of our items (Saag Paneer). At least they didnt try to charge us for it. But it was frustrating to wait that long and not even get what we ordered.
Here’s what we got:
Tandori Broccoli & Cauliflower — delicious seasoning
Chicken Tikki Masala — pretty solid, but NOT AMAZING
Lamb Chop — mediocre at best
Saag Paneer (which never arrived)
Then to top it off, they included a service charge (normal) but had a place on the bill to ADD more gratuity! Are you kidding! They are lucky I didnt argue with them to remove the service charge all together!
As I said, the food was delicious, but not worth that wait. If I ever eat from them again, I think it will be as take-​away only. Boooo Mela!

Really really average and overpriced food. It’s probably the worst Indian I’ve had in town. We had 1 prawn and 1 veggie main without starters and drinking tap water and we were charged 43£!! The food was kinda eatable but worth max 15£ all together. The waiter was really nice though and the ambience is ok.

My choice for Indian this trip and was so glad I waited until the very late opening for lunch Saturday 1:30PM. The proprietor suggeted the Shrimp with piri piri sauce and it was EXCELLENT! Lamb Roganjosh spicy but not hot. The Naan PERFECT. Wish I had enough appetite to try more. Highly suggest.

If you want a cheap good curry this is not the place to go. If you have your company’s credit card to wine & dine your client make sure you try this place out.
The service was slow but good. They seemed to be under staffed /​scattered every where and not knowing which table they were meant to be waiting when we went. It was a Thursday night after all. What I find strange was that the men to women ratio who were dinning that evening was 4:1.
The food were filled with flavor however for the price you’re paying for the size of the dish was not justifiable. I’m not sure whether I would go back again but I’d rather give other curry house a go that charge less or provide bigger portions.

The servers were pretty nice, and one of them was pretty funny.
The food was great. We had the tikka masala (standard goodness), spinach curry (decent), and a lamb chop (Yay! I’m a fan).
The atmosphere is nice, location is decent, and so yeah. We had originally planned to go to some other indian restaurant, but that place was closed for the new year. So, we quickly searched for an alternative and ended up here. No regrets.

More like 4.5 stars for us. We LOVED it so much we came twice during our 4 day span in London.
The Tikka Masala was AMAZING… rich, flavorful and not too clogged up w/​spice. You can actually taste the base of the sauce and the chicken. Know what I mean? I hate it when all you taste in Indian food are random spices that don’t «meld.» The Tikka Masala here was excellent.
They (like many others) make their Naan bread here fresh… so of course its good. Naan bread and the tikka masala sauce. Man… I could have just had an entire pot of that stuff =)
Our other entrée was the lamb dish, which was great but not particularly memorable. I did appreciate that it didn’t have that «lamb» smell, you know the one.
Seating is very very limited. Reservations are necessary and you will likely sit very close to your neighbors. We sat super close to our neighbors… and we chatted with them about what they ordered (lucky us hehe) so we figure out what was good =) Since the restaurant is small, there’s no real ambiance. It’s pretty dark, so I guess it’s good for a date.
It’s a super easy walk to the touristy sights… and I was very surprised that there was such good food to be had so close to all of the main tourist areas.

This was the 4^th Indian restaurant we tried during our trip to London, it was our least favorite. The food was about 3 stars, the service was 2.5 stars. It was just a weird vibe. It was hard to tell who are restaurant server was. We had multiple people serving us… that wouldn’t be a problem but each time the next person forgot to bring out our next course or they asked us the same question over and over. One of the younger servers creeped us out.
We asked for extra spicy but the food came out barely spicy. The SAAG GOHST lamb dish was okay, I have had better. (it was dry). The MURG JALFREZI chicken dish was okay but nothing to write home about. Our water glasses were refreshed in a timely manner.
Thankfully we had received a discount (via promotion) on our check since we had booked a reservation on-​line via TopTable (OpenTable’s sister site). I wouldn’t go out of my way to return to this place. Maybe it was a off night?

In short, Mela’s two-​course set lunch meal is an exceptional value, priced at £9.95.
Given the solid selection of various meat and veg dishes for both a starter and main, plus saffron rice, plus an enormous piece of freshly-​baked naan, one simply can’t complain.
I did raise my eyebrow at the can (nae bottle… can!) of Guinness that the boy demanded he sample, but who am I to judge? I had an oriental beer (Tiger, if you must know) while I noshed. I did find it passing strange that Mela doesn’t appear to offer any typical Asian ales like one might expect (hello, Kingfisher?), but a brew is a brew is a brew, no?
The automatic service charge they tack on is clearly well-​earned; everyone was polite, practised, and proficient. Not quite to the point of obsequiousness, but every single person here addressed me as ‘sir’ without fail. I can only be made to feel old so many times in one day.
As an aside, does the street name ‘Shaftesbury’ make anyone else want to giggle?

One of the things I really wanted to do in London compared to my previous visit 6 years ago was to eat the Indian food. Also my friend who was with me wanted to explore more of Covent Garden, so we decided to eat at this Indian restaurant after hearing some good reviews. Unfortunately, I would say that some of the food was good, but some of the food was not too good in proportion with the portions and price we paid for the meal (dishes we ordered were more than £11). I was really surprised, since London supposedly has some of the best Indian food outside of India. I would probably give this place more than 3 Stars out of 5 but definitely less than 4 Stars out of 5.
I ordered the Tandoori Chicken, while my friend ordered the Saag Gosht, which is lamb mixed with spinach and a mustard base. I got naan bread while my friend got rice. The thing that my friend and I did not like was that we would have to pay extra for the naan and the rice (about £5.50 extra for both).
The Tandoori Chicken was probably the most disappointing dish I had at this place. The chicken was kind of dry and bony. I also did not taste much of the flavourful spice as well. I think I had better Tandoori Chicken in Torrance, California, and even back in Boston. I did like the vegetables that came with the dish and the spiced sauce that came with it. It also served as a good dip for the naan as well. I did like the naan, it was nice and warm, as well as soft and chewy with a hint of toasty crispiness.
I had some of my friend’s Saag Gosht, and I liked it. I kind of regretted not ordering it, even though it was kind of expensive. The lamb and spinach were pretty tasty, and it tasted good with the rice. Portions I thought were fairly average.
I liked the comfortable and quiet atmosphere, it actually made me feel that I was eating at a fairly upscale restaurant. Service was also okay as well. Overall, this is not a bad place to get some decent Indian food if you have a good amount of money, but I think there are better choices in London.