Balti Bazaar

Friendly and welcoming staff. Lovely food and very happy to help and cater for Vegetarians! An award winning restaurant… You can certainly tell why! Can’t wait to go again!

Having seen BB in the press winning this & that award I had wanted to revisit for some time. I had tried before without success, a good sign I thought. Being 7.00pm on a Saturday night and hadn’t booked I thought getting in would be a unlikely however perhaps as there were only two of us they got us a table.
The décor is pleasant enough, difficult to describe so lets be generous and call it nearly contemporary, personally I don’t go for fish tanks but it was somewhere to put their awards on. It is quite cramped and they were squeezing then in on the night and it was a bit too cramped & therefore noisy. They have an upstairs but don’t appear to use it, perhaps the kitchen can’t service that many diners?
The service was was quick, far too quick. I barely had my coat off before the menu, drinks & popadoms were offered. There’s a reasonable choice including a long list of so called Specials. I have said before and it may be an injustice but this can often result in the differences between dishes being subtle. This night I thought I would try something a little different but our waiter wasn’t clued up or interested enough to offer much in the way of advice apart from the South Indian Garlic Chilli Chicken, the wife went for the Tawa.
The order was taken as the popadoms arrived. The starters arrived before we had finished the popadoms then (and I’m not kidding) but they tried to serve the main courses before we had finished the starters. Enough of this so we sent them back, to be fair they were apologetic but why they disn’t realise we weren’t ready is a mystery.
The onion bhaji & sheek kebab were good if not a little on mild side, nice salad but no sizzler,
Because we sent the main courses back when they did arrive they were now cool, obviously there didn’t appear to have been an effort to reheat. My meal wasn’t great, I believe the garlic chilli chicken was a standard curry that had had a dipping sauce added to it. It was therefore sickly sweet being neither hot or tasty. The wife however enjoyed her meal.
The pillau rice, cold garlic & coriander nan and frozen chips just about ok.
I can’t say that the staff made us feel very welcome, and no acknowledgement from any of them throughout, not even a how was your meal, I would have loved to have told them.
We were shoe horned in and it was our most disappointing evening for quite some time. I’m not sure where these awards come from but they wouldn’t have won anything on the night we visited. On a quiet night I guess it would have been a different story but other restaurants manage.
Three stars but only just.

Back home for a few days to do some revision and not have to worry too much about foraging for food or doing washing (parents are a wonderful invention), we fancied heading out for a curry.
Last time I was back here, we went to Flute, and that was first to be mentioned, but I found that a bit bland so we eventually settled on Balti Bazaar. I hadn’t been here since before I went to university, but I remembered it was good. My dad had been a few times since and recently he said it had been fairly busy so we phoned up to make sure there was a table free, which there was. We picked up some drinks (it’s a BYO) and headed off.
The car park was pretty much empty when we arrived, a few cars dotted around including one that must have been driven by someone incapable of parking (it was left parked in the middle of two bays and well away from the kerb giving the allusion that it was a dump-​and-​run operation). However we soldiered on and went inside, greeted by a lovely chap who showed us to our table and handed over menus. The menu here is huge, a massive selection which does make you feel a bit intimidated, though I knew what I was having (chicken tikka pathia — standard) so it wasn’t too bad.
We ordered poppadums, starters and mains and my dad, being the joker that he is, exclaimed loudly that if I asked the waiter nicely he’d put extra chillies in and told the waiter I always complained that it wasn’t hot enough. Essentially throwing the gauntlet down for the chef to destroy me. I agreed (probably a macho thing) and soon the poppadums came, with their mint sauce and red chilli sauce. I love anywhere that does the red chilli sauce and essentially drank it down using the poppadums as a vessel. Delicious.
My chicken puri starter was a bit greasy but tasty nonetheless, with its token side salad which I added leftover sauce to. A good start which was continued with the chicken tikka pathia, rice and naan for main. Despite the chilli challenge, the curry tasted lovely and the sauce and chicken very well cooked. I did eventually make the fatal mistake of stirring the chillis in but it was very tasty, and very close to my limit, so enjoyable as well. Naan wasn’t greasy at all and had a good mix of chewy and crunchy bits and the rice was rice so I couldn’t complain!
My family and girlfriend enjoyed theirs as well and we had a good night, though we did spend ages waiting to pay for the bill before realising we probably had to go and pay at the desk instead of them coming to us but service throughout was good and happy and smiley — they missed some mushrooms out of my dad’s curry and couldn’t be apologetic enough.
Lovely curry, great looking place (even with weird red wallpaper) and good service! Can’t wait to go back.