This is a story about shitty Indian food, a butler who doesn't understand English, and a pint of…read moreCoke.
Samrat looks like a typical Indian restaurant. It tries to look fancy from the outside, except it's in Plaistow and everything around it is ghetto fabulous. My boyfriend and I walked in to find a guy sitting in his track pants and a t-shirt, playing on his phone. Then a butler hurriedly came up and greeted us. It was a bizarre juxtaposition. He mumbled something and walked off.
The Mr. Track Pants had the nerve to look up and bark, "Well, follow him!"
Samrat is poorly lit. They say the dimmer the lights, the higher the prices. The butler asked us what we wanted to drink. I glanced at the menu and realized the only wine by the glass was an unmarked "white" and an unmarked "red." Everything else was by the bottle. I ordered the white, a bit carelessly.
My boyfriend ordered a Coke. The butler responded, "Do you want a half or a pint?" This is the first time in my life, and his, that we've heard a follow-up question for a Coke order. We began to wonder if the butler had misunderstood the Coke for a beer. The butler asked, "Would you like a pappadum?" We said sure. He followed-up, "How many?"
This is a really sneaky but cheap sort of trick. He did this repeatedly throughout the meal. He knows the pappadums aren't complimentary, but he asks casually enough to make it seem like they are (they were .50p each, which is roughly $1 USD). In the States at least, restaurants bring all sorts of starters free-of-charge, from Italian breads and butter to chips and fresh, homemade salsa.
The pappadums were weak. They definitely weren't fresh because they tasted like they'd been fried two Diwalis ago. They were served with large sauce dishes of mango chutney, chili sauce, and chopped onions. I decided to keep them at the table thinking that the restaurant was simply going to throw them away. The busser waited for a while before interrupting us later and taking the sauces away.
Turns out, Samrat reuses these sauce dishes! Talk about South Asian frugality to the max! This, in my opinion and probably the opinion of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is extremely unsanitary. All I can is I hope you're not sitting next to anyone who has any sort of transmittable disease, like Hepatitis A.
The butler really struggled with our food orders. I mean really struggled. It was apparent that English wasn't his first language (which is cool, if you're not a restaurant in England serving a majority English-speaking populace). The menu looked promising - Tandoori dishes to biryanis to karahi. I saw karahi and thought of my mother's chicken karahi. So I ordered it. My boyfriend spent five minutes repeating the same order to the butler: "I want the chicken biryani, extra hot--as hot as it can come--and make my side dish of tarka daal as hot as my main dish." To make matters worse, the butler was scrambling to write shit down. He had one job.
He came back with a lamb biryani, extra mild. Also, the daydreams of my mother's cooking was murdered with the arrival of a dish consisting of sugary lumps of chicken in some sort of canned tomato soup. In short, it was not karahi. It didn't even taste like South Asian food. The naan was hard and leathery. The rice portion, which is extra and does not come with chicken karahi (neither does the naan), was meager enough to satisfy maybe a 5-year-old in Kerala.
To make matters worse, the butler kept saying "Please" after he put down one fucked-up dish after another. ("Please, here's a dish you didn't order. Please, this one will make you miss your mother to the brink of tears. Please, remember to see a dentist after you rip out your gums out with this naan. Please, are you as comfortable as you could be in Guantanamo?")
And to add to this lovely ordeal, when we tried to pay, the butler kept repeating a higher total amount on our cards than what we instructed. We said, "Twenty on each card, please." He took this as some sort of invitation to barter and replied, "Okay so twenty-one?" This guy wanted more than a 20% tip on the bill. This is the kind of guy that makes all of us brown people look really bad.
In short, this place was an epic fail. Don't go. You'll end up spending £40 and absolutely regret it. You'll also spend the next week wondering if the butler doctored your receipts to cut himself a bigger break.
