Shehnai

Would give it no stars if I could! Had a work Christmas party here, the food was inedible, the DJ was so loud you couldn’t speak to the person next to you. Do not book here!

I have looked at Shehnai’s menu many a time when stopping off at this little parade of shops in the mornings. I got the chance to have dinner here last week with a friend
What had caught my eye was the interesting list of chef’s signature dishes, many of which I hadn’t seen on other Indian menus before.
I had a nice mango lassi and we chewed on some nice popaddoms while perusing the menu. Nice to see the condiments were inclusive with the popaddoms though I could have done with one spicy condiment to balance out the sweet ones
We went with stuffed brinjal (aubergine) rings and tandoori gulnehar, also known as pomfret, a fish common in Asian cooking. The brinjal rings were large. The stuffing was a mixture of French beans, button mushrooms, carrots, potato, Indian cheese and spinach. However, this had been so thoroughly mashed together that it was impossible to appreciate the different ingredients. The pomfret had been pan fried, perhaps a little overcooked but the tandoori spices did go well with the firm fleshed fish
For main course, we chose the Khyber Pass Rann (lamb shank braised in a robust gravy of onion, ginger, spices and rum) and Karwari fish curry, made with imported fish given flavour by tri-​fala, curry leaves and dill. The fish curry was nice in a non descript way and our waiter wasn’t able to shed more light on tri-​fala other than that it was an Indian spice. However, the outstanding dish of the evening and what earned this place a solid 4 Unilocal stars was the lamb shank, cooked to falling off the bone tenderness and given life by spices which gave a sweet and zingy note to the meltingly tender meat
Good solid Indian. I’d return for that lamb shank and there are other intersting looking dishes to try

I wish there was a 0 star rating for this place. When I asked for another lemonade they wouldn’t give it to me until I finished the last one so they could re-​use the glass. The food really had no taste, supermarket curries were better than theirs! They arrived luke warm and with a skin on. The staff did not once smile at us or ask if everything was ok, and in fact were very rude when taking our order (very clumsily) and seemed generally annoyed that we were there. The topic of conversation was dominated about the laughably bad food and unfriendly staff, no chance of getting a tip and if I wasn’t with polite company I would have refused to pay!
The only plus was that we didn’t eat much of the food or want a doggie bag so it was good for our diets!

After looking forward to a family outing for our Gran’s 89^th Birthday, we were in fact very disappointed indeed. I eat in a lot of Indian restaurants and have never had such poor service, the food was average and although the soft drinks were flat, the wine and lagers were fine. The assortment of our 10 main dishes were all bland with a medium dish tasting the same as a mild!
Drinks were delivered and passed across two people having to raise from the chair to receive them, we were ignored when asking for a special dietary requirement and told we could not change the pilau rice that came with the main dish to a vegetable rice! We generally felt unwelcome. Even being left to just leave while they seemed busy cleaning a few tables!
Not even worth a visit!