William Sitwell reviews The Tamil Crown, London: ‘The feel of a pub with a tight south Indian menu’
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The Tamil Crown in Islington, north London, was once a pub called The Prince Albert, founded 185 years ago. Then, in 2007, it was renamed The Charles Lamb after the English essayist who lived nearby in the 1820s. He was an accomplished writer who famously dealt with a mental health crisis by checking himself into an asylum. He described the experience to his fellow writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge, saying he had spent six weeks ‘very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton’, adding, ‘I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite anyone.’
So it’s a little sad that his name is now expunged from the site, replaced with the words The Tamil Crown. But I can think of worse trends than nice old British boozers being turned into respectable curry houses. Especially when this example retains its bar, its stools, its beers on tap, along with the simple feel of a pub thanks to wooden tables and random wooden chairs – and serves a tight menu of south Indian food. In fact, this is the sister restaurant to The Tamil Prince, which did a similar thing to The Cuckoo pub in nearby Barnsbury.
Unlike those ubiquitous Indian restaurants whose laminated menus offer a thousand dishes of vague and confused origin, this one suggests just six small plates, six large ones, roti and rice. And it seems a popular offering: the tables of this place, despite its residential location, filled steadily on a recent Wednesday.
We started with okra fries (slender strips of green in crisp batter) and bhel puri, a mound of puffy rice with pomegranate seeds and coriander, drizzled with chutney. Like that similar room-temperature Indian street-food snack chaat, it delivered a satisfying crunch and a heat that built with each mouthful.
My old boss John also ordered samosas, which I wouldn’t have done; I’ve never had one that wasn’t dry, heavy-going and crying out to be ameliorated by chutney. Yet people approach samosas wondering, just wondering, if the next one will be less like losing one’s life in quicksand. Of course it won’t be. And this one wasn’t.
But John Brown, at whose firm I worked for almost 20 years, has been right about a lot of things, in particular publishing a magazine called Viz, so who am I to argue? Except to say that his success in spotting the potential in Viz is equal to his failure in believing a samosa has promise.
We shared lamb chops, flawlessly blackened over the robata grill and with soft flesh, just a few seconds away from perfection (they could have been a touch pinker inside), alongside a decent and rich chicken curry, a bowl of gloriously wet, dal-like mango sambar, some fluffy rice and really excellent, thin and so-buttery-it’s-almost-wrong rotis.
We ordered a dessert of shrikhand, which I feared might be disappointing (intended as it is to be a gloopy pile of over-sweet, over-saffroned, heavy-on-the-cardamom yoghurt-based pudding), and I was again right. But whereas John’s spotting wisdom saw him sell his business in his early 50s for about £30 million, mine simply justifies my role as your conduit to eating out.
And to make the following pronouncement. If the Government cares so much about our wellbeing as to ban adults from buying cigarettes, then it should also force knackered old pubs to become decent Indian restaurants like this (because despite the dissatisfying samosas and pud – neither of which are really its fault – The Tamil Crown is indeed a decent Indian restaurant). And then maybe John could put his money where my mouth is.
