I’m exhausted by reviewing fine-dining Indian restaurants.
At one end of the scale you’ve got the really interesting ones, like Gymkhana and Quilon in London, doing something genuinely exciting with the food, backed up by great service. At the other, you’ve got your standard High Street Indian: a decent enough masala, a pint of Cobra, a naan the size of a small satellite dish and absolutely no need to think about any of it too deeply.
And then there’s the bit in between.
Kush, in Clifton, feels like it lives there. It’s for people who want to be told they’re having something more interesting than the High Street Indian, while secretly wishing they were at the High Street Indian.
It’s a bit like an adult, an actual adult, dressing up in a full Manchester United kit. Shirt, shorts, boots, shin pads, the lot. On paper, it looks like someone who might play football. Then they start kicking the ball.
The service is provided by what feels like a bunch of moody teenagers. Nothing offensive, exactly. Nobody is rude. But high-end? No. There is none of that polished, anticipatory service you expect when you’re paying proper money for dinner.
Periodically, between courses, someone comes along and wipes the table down with a wet cloth.
“Table cloth?” I hear you ask.
No.
Just the smell of disinfectant and a wet table, ready for the next course. It’s less fine dining and more someone preparing a desk for the next pupil.
And I was sat at the top of the stairs to the kitchen, staring directly at the toilet door, which doesn’t exactly set the scene for culinary transcendence.
Then came the pork ribs with Rechaedo spices., which surely, surely, ought to have been interesting. They weren’t. There was so little meat on them I briefly wondered whether they’d been sent out as a geological sample.
And then the slow-cooked lamb arrived, which was dry.
Slow-cooked lamb. Dry. How?
That’s not a minor technical wobble. That’s like ordering a bath and being handed a damp flannel.
The frustrating thing is that Kush clearly wants to be interesting. You can see the ambition. You can see the effort. You can see the desire to move beyond the Cobra-and-masala end of the spectrum.
But sometimes you just want the thing to actually taste good.
Honestly, it was a shame. And after all this fine-dining Indian reviewing, I’m beginning to think I might just go back to the High Street and order a masala.
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