The Colonial

placed an order and they cancelled without telling me! Refused to say why. Terrible customer service! AVOID!!!

My review is for the Neutral Bay restaurant. Great curries and friendly service. If you like your curry to have a «nice» bite then order medium if not mild should suffice. Good spot for catching up with friends, and don’t forget a bottle of red.

Oh dear… If I could minus stars for food I would here.
Being Anglo-​Indian, I’m from a British Indian family, this restaurant sells this as its cuisine speciality, it’s niche, it’s my comfort food.
Having eaten here just after it opened, when they served an excellent onion bahji but could not follow it up, I thought it fair to try again.
The onion bahji was still excellent and our other starter was a lamb sheek kebab. This was dry and not very interesting. It was also served on a sizzling plate as expected, but the plate was sizzling with cabbage… That’s sizzling fried cabbage. Really? I’ve never seen this, it should be onion, that’s a part of its flavouring!
Anyway we let that pass.
Our mains were a beef vindaloo and a ‘chefs special’ of lamb cutlets, served with pilau rice and cheese and onion nan.
The vindaloo, nan and rice landed… It all looked fine, but we had to wait and wait for the lamb, which eventually arrived.
I looked at it rather quizzically. It looked awful, grey, bitty and again served on sizzling cabbage!
The vindaloo was fine, if containing very, very little meat, the nan and the rice, ok, nothing wow or amazing, but it’s unfair to always expect that, but the lamb was truly one of the worst dishes I have ever had the displeasure of sharing a table with.
It was overcooked, dry and flavourless and looked disgusting.
I examined it further. It looked like lamb cooked three ways.
There were 5 cutlets, well one was a bone with no meat. One was bbq’d to cinders, one looked as though it had been deep fried and the other three tasted tough and grey. No flavour was noticeable. Yuck!
I asked the staff about the lamb and particularly about the sizzling cabbage.
They said this was how they do it. I asked why no onions, they said because they produce too much water… Seriously? If you can’t cook onions can you really be in a kitchen?
To be fair they agreed cabbage wasn’t the traditional base for the ‘sizzling’ dish (see photos posted by others of sizzling onions!) and offered to replace the lamb dish, which remember, we’d already waited for. We declined as it just felt like we wanted to end this meal as soon as we could.
I guess this reminded me that you need to trust your gut instinct.
When I was placing the order the waiter didn’t know what a vindaloo was… I asked if he knew his menu, he said he was new. Fair enough, but it is an Indian restaurant… It was a vindaloo…
Please guys up your game…
There is a gap in the market in Sydney for good Indian dining, as witnessed up the street by the Malabar, which was booked out.
Currently this place is nowhere near good enough to be in this market.
Indeed if the Malabar is full, sadly the North Indian Diner on Oxford street is a significantly better bet than The Colonial… and about a third of the price.
I’ve now tried this place twice… Never again

The Colonial certainly has the potential to serve top class Indian fare. Unfortunately they fall down in a couple of key areas.
The dishes themselves are not elevated above the average Indian dish that I can obtain anywhere in Sydney. From a local takeout shop to a restaurant. It simply isn’t memorable. They’d get a 3-​star for the food.
However, they have an even more critical issue to deal with. We had two waiters serving our table of 8 (the only diners in the place at lunch time) and between the two of them they only managed to take half a tables worth of drink orders. Some people at the table were on their second drink before I got to order my first, and when it was ordered, no one bothered to bring it over so it had to be re-​ordered. The service in that regard was just sloppy, it was as if the staff hadn’t been trained and were maybe just fill-​ins totally winging it for the day. I shudder to think what would happen if the place was full or even just had another table of diners.
There was some redemption in the form of the food service, with all the dishes arriving at a reasonable time. This would be due to the chefs and not the wait staff though.
Sadly, the food was just not memorable, and the poor service certainly was, so I have no real reason to return to the Colonial.

Eliza B.: Your recommendation made my day!
This is not the most cosy place on earth, I would go somewhere else with a first date as it all looks a bit cold, not bad, could just need a little lift up.
However, service very friendly, cheerful, helpful, just lovely.
And the food: Chicken Til Til, sesame, a lot, if you like sesame you will love it! Comes with a spicy tomato sauce, excellent!
I know I am eating too much meat here in Sydney, but I still could not resist to try a chicken tikka masala in an Indo-​English restaurant — hey, this is the English national dish! And I was not disappointed at all, in the opposite, this was one of the best I had in many years, very spicy as I ordered it that way, still the creamy tomato sauce was splendid! The Naan I had aside was plain good.
Recommended, highly!

One of the best Indian restaurants in Sydney. We will be going back again next Saturday
We did go back again on Saturday, sorry to say it was not good. It was completely different to our first visit. The curry were very dry, not much sauce. And one of the curries the meat was tough. If we know when the chef was working the first time we went, we would go again

There is something so great about digging into a steamy well-​made curry when the weather turns cold. And not only were the mains great at the Colonial, they were also a really good deal.
***** Shahi paneer ($ 16) — Awesome. Creamy, slightly sweet, vegetarian, and it has really nice paneer cheese. Good recommend for folks who aren’t sure about Indian food.
***** Palak paneer ($ 14) — spinach and paneer cheese dish. Also got high marks from the table.
*** Shallot & cheese stuffed naan 4.50 — a bit heavy. Next time will go for the garlic.
**** Gulab for dessert — a sort of donut served in a glass with a sweet syrup.
And if you have a heap of hilarious ball jokes that you are just waiting for the opportunity to share, this is the dessert for you :-)
— Rice $ 2
They are a bit new, so looks like they are still working out a few things — but the meal tonight and the friendly service bodes well for their future …
They also deliver.