I went to Mela last week with my brother. It's at the Holborn end of Shaftesbury Avenue; if you want a pub to meet in, you can do worse than the Angel which is a Sam Smith's pub on St Giles High Street. The decor is modern, and the service extremely attentive and courteous. We started with a poppodum each with pickles, and then for a starter I had Calamari Pakhtooni which was basically squid ciooked in a hot curry sauce. The squid was meltingly tender and the sauce extremely tasty. My brother had Gurdaspuri Whitebait, which were cooked in a mild but spicy gram flour coating - very tasty. For a main course I had Burra Champ Madiri which is lamb chops (3 or 4) marinated in rum and spices and cooked in the tandoor; my brother had duck, which was more like a curry as it came with quite a lot of sauce. We had jeera pullao - rice cooked with cumin, roti, and a minced lamb kulcha (basically keema naan, but quite the best I've ever had). They also do kulcha stuffes with spicy potato, which I now regret having not had. Mela doesn't seem to do vegetable side dishes. They do have vegetable main course dishes, which you could share, but my brother announced he didn't realy like having vegetables with a curry and I couldn't eat a whole dish, so we didn't have any. However, most of the dishes seem to come with a small portion of side salad anyway. We had tandoori fruit kebab for afters, which takes 15-20 minutes to cook but is pretty good - chunks of apple, pear, banana, mango all cooked on a skewer in the tandoor and served with a dipping sauce called "rabri". We had a 500 ml bottle of beer each, minerral water, and finished off with a cup of tea - I had darjeeling, they also serve assam, earl gray and masala chai. The cost was about £32 each, which I thought wasn't too bad - we both had fairly expensive main courses and yiou can eat cheaper by having the early evening set menu. I woukld definitely go back; the food and service were excellent, although anything would come as a bit of an anti-climax after their mouth-watering website at http://www.melarestaurant.co.uk/. It was good to go to a restaiurant that was a bit different and didn't serve traiditional curry house style food. In addition, I beleive Mela is also the current Eevening Standard Indian Restaurant of the Year. Hmm [thinks] I think I'm better at eating food than writing about it... Article 4277 of uk.food+drink.indian:
London, United Kingdom