After a day at the British Museum, we went to Punjab Restaurant for dinner. Founded in 1946, it is…read morethe oldest North Indian Punjabi restaurant in the UK. I love Indian food, and Metro Vancouver has a huge Indian population, so Indian food is comfort food.
The restaurant's wall was decorated with various historical photographs, and right above our table was a photo of Vancouver, titled "Well-dressed Sikhs walking along the street in Vancouver, Canada c. 1908." Although over 100 years ago, I immediately recognized the location -- the corner of Granville and Hastings. How coincidental is that, to be thousands of miles away from home in a different continent, and to come across a photograph of the very street corner I cross multiple times a week!
I don't recall what my husband had (a chicken dish), but I had Acharri Murgha ("chicken curry cooked in a traditional pickling spice mix") and it was delicious! Both my husband and I thoroughly enjoyed our meal -- it was a taste of home!
I also had a couple of glasses of wine, but each glass was 250ml, so I was pretty tipsy. In the washroom, a woman, another tourist, started conversing with me, but she only spoke French, and despite being drunk and rarely speaking French, I was able to have a semi-coherent conversation (she was also a bit tipsy). I had a drunken conversation in French inside an Indian restaurant in England!
Anyway, Punjab Restaurant is one of the best Indian restaurants I have been to, and it is no surprise that it has been around since 1946.
[Yelp collections: Europe 2024; London, England]