New Patri menu impresses, ‘but no award-winning biryani!’

By Yasir Khan

HALAL STATUS Fully Halal food menu • Alcohol served

Having been to Patri before and really enjoyed their food, this time I decided to take my family for a small snack on a busy Saturday early evening.

As always though, these guys are packed during the weekend; so unless you’re a close relative, don’t even bother, especially since they have a user-friendly booking system on their website.

Be safe and book ahead, particularly if it’s their Northfields’ branch because that’s even smaller than their Hammersmith one.

Anyway, when we got there, we were greeted with the good news of Patri having again updated their menu with the introduction of dishes from New Delhi (actually, they’ve added a few new items; but it’s mainly a smaller refined menu more than anything else).

I also noticed another new addition, which was a framed picture of them having made the finals for the Best Newcomer at this year’s British Curry Awards (and during this write up, they also won a host of awards at Feed the Lion yearly awards).

This ‘Old Delhi Pani Puri Bombs’ was the first of three starters we ordered from the ‘Vegan Street Food’ section. The Pani Puri was the traditional kind.

Good amount of spice with a make-it-to-your-style concept. I did find the puri casing hard in texture, which was good as it held together strongly with no cracks, allowing us to fill it right to the top with ease.

From the ‘Signature Chaat Bhandar’, we got this ‘Special Raj Kachori’ which was the star of the show.

The fillings were perfect – lots of flavour, wet sauce, yoghurt, tamarind, and good contrast of textures and varied spices. The extra touches of ginger and green chili strips were interesting too, though easy to avoid if it’s not your flavour.

Another from the ‘Signature Chaat Bhandar’ was the ‘Boyfriend Chat’ (yeah, that’s what it’s called). It was nice but smaller in size, which is reflected in the price when compared to the awseome Raj Kachori.

For me though, it lacked the robust flavours of its predecessor, which to be fair was just on another level, meaning that although this was still great, I did find it a bit similar to the above.

From the ‘Old Delhi Meat Classics’ section we got the ‘Pantry Chicken Curry’. We tried just one large main which we found to be enough for 3-adults if you pair it up with two tandoori rotis and steamed rice. We did feel as though £2.50 for the much-needed roti was a tad much though.

The base ingredient is tomato with lots of gravy which goes along way. The curry was very much home-style curry. Being tomato based, it was easy to eat with the spoon.

It’s not something I will order again as my family circle produce this on a weekly basis (although they are all great cooks in their own right).

This portion of Pop Corn Chicken and Chips was ordered from the ‘Kids Bachaas’ section, and was more than enough for three with plenty left over for us adults too.

Overall, a great experience once again! If I did have one criticism, it would be great if Patri could clearly mark which items are actually NEW to the menu (and for God’s sake, please have at least one biryani on the menu at all times, especially after winning an award for it – that was one of the main reasons we came down!).

With a lack of desserts, we ended up going to ‘Creams’ down the road in Ealing Broadway; but that’s a story for another ‘Your Say’ (coming soon).

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Patri
139 Northfield Ave, Northfields, London W13 9QT.

T: +44 (0)20 3981 3388 | W: patri.co.uk | E: [email protected]

Opening Hours: Sun-Wed 12:00–14:30, 18:00-22:00 | Thur-Sat 12:00–14:30, 18:00-23:00