Star Of India

This is our local Indian — it’s walkable and they will always fit a couple in. The service is usually friendly and quick and the food comes quickly. You can get a new waiter (very few women) but they are well supervised by the long-​standing staff; in 12 years of going there several times a year, I’ve only experienced one serious waiting mistake, which the proprietor realised and corrected before I complained. Modern décor and coloured lighting, a little bit cheap, but clean and tidy. Small toilets, but again clean. When busy it can be noisy.
A long menu, good range of beers. The food is plentiful and competently cooked, there are more elaborate dishes in the chef’s menu, but the basics are very economical and well cooked. They will also cook a particular dish that’s not on the menu but is in the typical canon of local Indian restaurants. It’s very economical to eat there; they also do (a lot of) takeaways.
Perfectly competent local Indian restaurant, but not a gourmet experience.

After having a few Xmas beers with the lads, it’s rude not to have a curry. We piled in about 10pm & it was still quite busy & we were promptly seated. The waiter by telepathy knowingly asked to take our rudimentary beer/​poppadom orders & good they were.
For mains I asked for curried lamb & okra, pilau rice & a side if cauliflower bhaji.
All was decent, service was excellent & did the job of satisfying our bellies.

I had avoided eating here before because of the lack of a menu displayed outside. I don’t know why restaurants do this and when I asked my waiter, he couldn’t come up with a good answer.
Anyway, I decided to take a chance on dining here as I had tried all other places in Cheam. There seemed to be a good crowd of happy diners inside and my instincts turned out happily to be right.
The service levels were spot on and the staff kept checking in to make sure everything was OK, even when the restaurant got busy later on.
I enjoyed a popaddom while perusing the menu, which was served with a nice yoghurt dip and mango chutney. My onion bhajee starter arrived suspiciously quickly but hey, it tasted lovely.
My main course of shatkora gosht was unusual and lovely — nice tender cubes of lamb cooked in a piquant dark sauce and finished with the juice of an Inidian fruit related to grapefruit. I only know this as I had seen this dish enjoyed by Rick Stein on his recent TV series, travelling through Bangladesh. Rick’s recommendation was much appreciated in this case. I had pilau rice and a purée to go with the dish.
Aided by a very generous glass of wonderfully thick mango lassi, I was too stuffed for dessert.
Fantastic dining experience. Just get that menu up outside, guys!

This is probably the best Indian food I have ever had — the lamb bhuna here is one of those dishes that is too nice to risk ordering anything else once you’ve tried it! The staff are lovely and the restaurant itself is nice but the real pull is the FOOD which is SO GOOD. Definitely worth visiting!