Customer Reviews

Favourite Restaurant Curries (Curry Club)

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Like quite a few of Pat Chapmans other books, this one concentrates mostly on recipes, with a fairly sparse section on ingredients and methods. However, this is A Good Thing, if you already own one of the definative works such as the authors The Curry Bible. The work, therefore, stands on the strength of it's recipes. And it stands pretty tall on those. From the standards ( Chicken Madras ) to the downright yucky ( lambs brain curry ), the recipes are easy to follow, and as expected from this source, extremely tasty. Each recipe comes from a well-known curry house, mostly in the UK, but a few from the sub-continent, and the USA. Each is also accompanied with Pats' anecdote about the restaurant, which are frankly pretty tedious. Overall, an excellent, and pretty inexpensive collection of damn good recipes!

I've prepared a lot of Indian dishes in my time, and I've used a lot of recipes. Curries being the foundation of most mainstream Indian entrees and many sides, if you get Curry right, you'll have the rest of the meal right. This book is the only one I've seen that really gets Curry right. This book covers topics other than Curries, such as generally-useful info (prep, equipment, etc.), starters, meat, chicken, rice & bread, etc. etc. It also has a great appendix ("The Store Cupboard") containing a shopping list of all the basic spices and ingredients every Indian kitchen needs. You should check it out if you want to really learn to cook great Indian food.