The Pink Turban

This place is TERRIBLE.
We’d heard good things about this place and living about a 20 minute drive away, in the wild of North Lanarkshire where good Indian food is hard to come by, we decided to give it a try.
Parking is an issue from the start — there is very limited space around and no car park. We were lucky and got a space on the street outside someone’s house, as someone else was leaving.
Upon arrival, we were greeted and shown to a table squeezed in next to the drinks cabinet. The whole ambience of the place is 1980s social club. The tables are very close together and if it had been busy, which it wasn’t, it would have been pretty uncomfortable being cheek by jowl with the table next door.
The service was atrocious. We were asked by a very young girl what drinks we wanted, and off she went to fetch them. After about 10 minutes, she came back with a tray with our two drinks, and two other drinks, both pints of soft drinks with ice. After depositing our drinks on table, she then dropped the tray, depositing a further two drinks all over our legs and feet. Although she muttered an apology as she wiped it up, there was no attempt made to ask if we needed towels to mop ourselves up, nor did the management seem to be interested.
To add insult to injury, we waited at least 15 minutes before we eventually flagged someone down to ask for a menu. A gormless young chap then handed us two paper take-​away flyers. At this point, I was thinking about getting up and leaving, but a girl then came over to give us the correct menus and tell us about the buffet. Sadly, we didn’t see this girl again during our visit — she seemed to be the only person in the building with more than one brain cell, so she was obviously in high demand. This is also the only time I’ve ever been to an Indian restaurant and they have clearly been AGAINST you ordering from the a la carte menu!
With no further assistance in sight, we eventually just helped ourselves to the buffet — clearly, ordering anything else was not an option, and I was ravenous by this point. The starters were all dried up and lukewarm — if it wasn’t for the crudely printed signs, I wouldn’t have even been able to identify some of the items. Hats off though for pushing the boundaries of «Indian cuisine» by including fish fingers and chicken nuggets, truly a global experience.
The curries themselves were fine — a wide selection was on offer, though mostly chicken based. There were a couple of lamb curries, but as the printed menu only offered mutton, I’m unsure of the veracity of that. There was one dish with prawns in, too. The three curries I sampled were just OK — nothing special at all. The chicken garlic masala was clearly just the garlic mushroom starter with chicken instead of mushrooms — thrifty!
Poppadoms, condiments and naan breads were fine and in plentiful supply. We didn’t sample the dessert options — we were so thoroughly demoralised by that point, that we couldn’t wait to leave. We had to wait what felt like an ice age for our bill to arrive and then someone to find the card machine and the wherewithal to bring it to our table. I would only return here under duress, possibly at knife point.

I loved the buffet in the pink turban. By far the best Indian buffet I’ve had. The selection of different dishes was fantastic and all tasted superb. They did have a menu you could order from if you didn’t fancy the buffet. Only Negatives: i seem to remember they only had one beer (I don’t drink the stuff, so can’t remember what it was) and the tables are very close together.

The Pink Turban offers Indian cuisine in a buffet format. There is always ample food and it is really well priced. It doesn’t really cater for people who do not enjoy Indian food so if you have someone of that ilk in your company they will struggle.
The tables are set quite close together and people are always popping up to the buffet so not the place for a quiet romantic meal for two.
Great for a group of friends and they welcome families and children.
My advice would be… limit the volume of your starters so that you can sample more of the mains. Enjoy. Xx