Restaurant review: Gymkhana in London has food fit for a maharaja

Here is joy in a silver bowl in a setting that should bring me out in a rash. We’re surrounded by relics of the Raj in London’s Mayfair, a postcode where it’s only a matter of time before they charge for breathing the bejewelled air. Gymkhana is a restaurant that couldn’t get more jolly polo sticks if it gave you a rub down with saddle soap and told you to buck up old bean.

But I’m fine with the clubby sepia reek of the room, all mahogany ceiling fans and framed pictures of long gone cricket teams. Because I can still summon the memory of their black lentil dal, a bowl of silken spice with more butter in it than a dairy aisle. A dal of which dreams are made.

It’s been a dash from the airport through congealed traffic to get here and I’ve just squeaked in with minutes to spare before the kitchen closes.

In some virtual serendipity my sister-in-law had been checking out the menu online when I emailed to see if she’d join me for lunch here so we’re both a bit delighted to be here.

We’re going with the bar menu, which is the same as the lunch offering. This means we have the street-level restaurant to ourselves as the worker bees in the rest of this manically busy hive of a city return to their lives. We’re seated at a large dark panelled booth with a cool marble tabletop under our forearms as the dishes of loveliness keep coming.

There’s a flat silver dish of creamy duck egg bhurji, like a fleetingly solid scrambled omelette dotted with sweet hits of lobster meat. It comes with a saucer-sized malabar paratha, a flatbread made by folding silky dough with oil or butter like a concertina and then rolling it into a rose. The dough is finally flattened so it fries up dense and layered like the innards of the lardiest of croissants.

Some soft-shell crab has been fried bhaji style into crunchy brown snarls with a side of jhalmuri samphire, a spiced puffed rice which has a curry-for-breakfast vibe from its texture but eats like the street food snack it is.

The kid goat methi keema is a head-butt of a dish, rich earthy curried threads of meat cut with spices with two teeny shiny buns alongside to make goat sliders. There’s chola, a spicy stew of chickpeas with bhatura, a flat bread puffed up like a supermarket bag snagged on a branch in a gale. The bread collapses with no help from us into a warm silky tool to scoop up the chickpeas.

Then there’s that dal maharani. It’s a simple small bowl of black lentils cooked for what tastes like days in an earth red buttery soup, the lentils providing little full stops of bite and body in a song of spice. A velvety spinach saag is laced with crumbs of paneer, pale chunks of tangy cheese that still taste like the milk they had been not very much earlier.

Alongside all these shared plates and bowls we sip yoghurt-thick alphonso mango lassis from chilly silver tankards and get regular top-ups of tap water from the utterly lovely wait staff.

As our “lunch” straddles two wait staff shifts they don’t seem to mind that we’re becoming as permanent a pair of fixtures as the bristly boar’s head mounted on the wall nearby.

To finish there are coffees and truffles: four of them fennel, lime, chilli and a final cumin one which tastes delightfully like curry cloaked in chocolate. This is a restaurant that’s not precious or puffed up with its own pomposity.

In London terms it’s not even that expensive. Like the Indian food at its heart, it’s warm, clever and convivial. Gymkhana is simply a joy.

Lunch for two with coffees and lassis came to £80.03 (€112.50)

Second helping . . .

I've been inspired by chef Graham Neville to see my chive flowers not as a failure to stop the chive patch from bolting but as a great new ingredient. Snip off each puffball head and they can be pulled apart into a scatter of tiny purple bells. The walled garden at Kenah Hill in Killiney, where Neville will get ingredients for his kitchen at Restaurant 41 in Residence on St Stephen's Green this summer, was slow to start producing after a chilly spring. But these vegetables were worth the wait. The courgette flowers are back, stuffed with seafood and swimming in a frothy complex bisque. My favourite on a recent ramble through garden-inspired menu was sweetly cooked onion shells in miso sauce sprinkled with chive flowers.

Restaurant Forty One, Residence, 41 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2 (01) 6620 000