10:52am Thursday 11th June 2009
AS soon as you walk into The Vedas you realise you are not in a typical Indian restaurant.
The restaurant, which sits under the Marsden House apartment development, is modern, the decor chic and the food offers a different take to that on offer in most establishments of its type. It’s Indian with a twist.
It’s Saturday night, earlyish, but the place is already filling up, which is a good sign.
We’re quickly seated by a friendly waiter, who proffers the wine list, which is more extensive and more carefully selected than many Indian restaurants, which tend to concentrate rather more on the food than the drink.
We chose an Argentinean chardonnay, which at £13,95, was light, fruity and crisp — ideal on an uncommonly warm night.
As soon as we began to peruse the starters list, we realised this was a restaurant that catered for all tastes. If you don’t particularly like Indian food, it was easy to find an alternative.
Prawn puri, curried monkfish parcels, king prawn rolls, Thai fish cakes and Welsh goat’s cheese, as well as various grills and roasts, sit alongside more traditional dishes such as onion bhaji, paneer chat and samosa, with most coming in between £3.50 and £5.
We opted for mushroom paratha (pan-fried Indian bread filled with sauteed garlic mushrooms) and sundal (black peas tossed in onions, potatoes and coriander) and were able to complete this extremely tasty course without being full, which can happen in some Indian restaurants.
Mains on offer include the usual madrasi, bhuna, balti dupiaza and roghani dishes, alongside the lesser-known likes of palak thoran and kali mirchi. Interestingly, many of the dishes were available with Bengal roasted seabass. Most were priced at less than £10.
We decided to try something a bit different and went for aloo methi and chilli paturi, sharing a lime pilau rice, peshwari naan and vegetable thoran and chani bhaji side dishes.
Everything we tasted was excellent. The aloo methi, which was cooked in fengureek, was light and aromatic, spicy but not overly powerful, while my partner pronounced the chilli paturi, cooked using ginger, herbs and tandoori massala sauce “absolutely divine”.
The naan was light and tasty and the lemon in the rice gave it an added zing, while the side dishes were superb.
We didn’t manage a dessert, and left nicely full but not too stuffed that it hurt. At around £45 we felt it was possibly slightly more expensive than most Indian restaurants — but this wasn’t most Indian restaurants.
Rather than being purely Indian, The Vedas is more a venue that happens to specialise in quality Indian food but offers plenty of choice for people of all tastes.
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