Dakhin, Glasgow - Restaurants in Glasgow | s1play.com

Dakhin

Review published on 06/12/2004 © Sunday Herald

Given that Glasgow shows few signs of getting northern Indian food right, I had low expectations of Dakhin’s “south Indian” kitchen. Many Anglo-Indian curry houses are trying to enliven their menus by slipping on southern sounding dishes. Add the word ‘Malabar’ to a menu description – a term referring to India’s south-western coast – and it sounds exotic, even if it’s the same old curry house formula.

What a delicious surprise then to find that Dakhin is serving up pukka southern food with a freshness, savour and expertise about it that signals the presence of proper south Indian chefs in the kitchen. There is nothing half-hearted about it either. It would go down well in Cochin or Madurai.

Let’s hope that Glaswegians are up for a steep learning curve with some new taste challenges. Dakhin could assist that process by adding more explanation about how dishes are teamed up. The menu cries out for a ready-assembled “thali” meal which teaches southern Indian food etiquette by example. A dish of sour spongy idlis on their own is perplexing. Team it up with an aromatic lentil gravy and you see the point.

Feeling in vegetarian mood, we ignored the meat offerings and the fish (it was a Monday) and began with rasam, the southern consommée that inspired colonial mulligatawny. This tonic soup, with its stimulating sour-peppery character, primed the taste buds for two sorts of vada (vegetable croquettes). The lentil ones were crumbly and ably spiced with dry and fresh herbs. The other was potato-based with a pleasing, slightly glutinous texture.

Then there were really fantastic mysore bonda, potatoes tempered (seasoned with hot spiced oil) with mustard seed and curry leaf, combined with grated coconut then coated in chickpea flour batter and fried. Along with a demonstrably home-made green chilli and lime pickle, some still warm spiced lentils in a reduced tomato gravy and a sprinkling of toasted coconut with salt and sugar, they might have made a meal in themselves.

But we ploughed on, savouring a fabulously crisp, truly textbook ground rice dosa filled with dry spiced potato, a lacy appam (its batter is fermented for two days to give a flavour akin to sour dough bread) and a very sound sambhar – a staple hybrid lentil soup/liquid curry traditionally served with these southern rice specialities.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking it is too watery. This is how it is meant to be. In it was drumstick, a fibrous vegetable (you suck out the flesh and discard the fibre), its presence an indication of the lengths to which Dakhin has gone to be authentic. In the typically Keralan mild, yoghurty avial, there were more Indian vegetables, this time bitter melon which, despite its title, is mild and marrow-like.

By the time the okra arrived – carefully fried so as not to become gluey in a rich gravy cut by tamarind’s sourness – we had bitten off more than we can chew.

Portions are generous and on the whole well-priced, but there are aberrations. A £7 tag for three idlis or a plain dosa would be met with howls of laughter in Trivandrum or Mysore. A disappointing cardamom kulfi just didn’t have the required evaporated milk texture to make it convincing. The “saffron-flavoured” halwa didn’t taste of saffron.

Otherwise though, a promising and innovative addition to Glasgow’s comfort zone curry house cooking.

© Sunday Herald