Masala (Tasting Menu)

Regular readers of my blog will know that Curry House in Palmovka is my personal Prague spice spot of choice, but when I saw a recent Lime & Tonic deal for a Ten Course Taster menu for two for just 580 CZK (discounted from the usual price of 1,200 CZK) at Masala Pod Karlovem last month, I definitely thought it was worth making an exception for… 🙂

And so it was that a visiting Mr K and I both rather foolhardily set forth on that one evening when even Prague’s most resilient of public transportation systems all but surrendered to the arctic blizzard conditions, turning up at Masala a good three quarters of an hour late in urgent need of a nice hot curry to warm our near frozen extremities and stave off the impending onset of hypothermia.

Golden Tikka

Like most Brits abroad, my good friend Prague Ginge and I are true curry fiends, ever in search of the perfect Indian restaurant here in the Czech Republic to substitute in for our own favourite vindaloo venues of back home.

And so when Prague Ginge got her hands on a 50% off Slevomat voucher for Golden Tikka, she asked me to go along with her to check the place out.

I’d been to the Golden Tikka at Konviktská (previously entitled Tikka Dhaba, as I re-call) with friends a year or more back, but none of us had been particularly blown away at the time or tempted back in the meantime.

However, with a relatively new branch now opened up on Kateřinská by I. P. Pavlova, I was keen to see how this one compared both with my previous Tikka visit and other Indian restaurants round town as well.

Diwali in Prague

Looking back, it can only have been back at international school in Singapore that I first learned to associate religious festivities with food rather than faith.

After all, what with Diwali, Eid, Moon Day, Chinese New Year and the rest all serving as annual occasions for the faithful kiddies in the class to bring in the appropriately themed confectionary items to mark the day, it was only to be expected that my religious affiliations would veer wildly over the course of the year in accordance with the various goodies on offer at any given event, before – in the face of this intellectually overwhelming cultural / religious diversity – dwindling over time to virtually none whatsoever by the tender age of eleven.

A couple of decades on and I am still a confirmed (some might even say militant) atheist, but certainly not one averse to partaking in religious festivities, so long as I get something nice to eat in the process… 🙂

And so it was that the girls and I set forth last Saturday to the Mother Tereza Community Centre at Háje to help celebrate Diwali by means of watching lots of energetic Bollywood / bhangra style dancing, eating lots of yummy Indian food, and drinking several more glasses of wine between us than is really appropriate for any religious event – other than Christmas of course… 🙂

Masala (Pod Karlovem)

 

Back in 2007/8, me and Masala on Mánesova used to have a bit of a “thing” going on.

Ah, I remember it well… The sense of heady anticipation generated back then by owner Bobby Jain in his free tastings and good-humored hype campaigns on expat forums; the undeniable spark between us when first Masala and I did meet; the subsequent butterflies in my stomach (and not the Delhi belly kind either) on the way home at having at long last located a place for decent curry in this otherwise spice-lorn city… Happy days.

For a while, things continued splendidly between us, but over time, bit by bit, I slowly started to realize that Masala was no longer returning the love in quite the same way. Dwindling portion sizes, inconsistent quality and constantly overstretched service left me feeling neglected and betrayed, and over time the relationship eventually started to fizzle out, finally coming to a decisive end once and for all when my affections were won over by then newcomer-to-the-scene Curry House in Palmovka (one recent disappointing dalliance with Dilli Delhi in Vinohrady notwithstanding).

A year or so down the line, and I thought I was fully over my relationship with Masala – that is, however, until the recent opening of a new branch on Pod Karlovem in Nusle suddenly and unexpectedly reawakened all my long-forgotten emotions for the place.

Clearly Masala was making great efforts at a new beginning, and I thought it fair to give the place a second chance – if only for old time’s sake.

A Day in the Life of a Home Counties Girl…

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Sad to say, but in many ways I vehemently hate the “Broken Britain” of today.

I hate ‘Elf and Safety and political correctness gone mad. I hate the current culture of dependency and the degenerate chavscum who roam the streets. I hate the chronic overcrowding, prohibitive property prices, crap public transport, and the fact that you seem to haemorrhage money there every time you but sneeze. I hate that we’ve run up a £900 billion odd deficit by bankers / governments simply being retarded. And I’m just waiting for us to somehow bugger up the Olympics in 2012…

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I’m sorry – I seem for a moment to have forgotten that this is a food and drink blog and not the Daily Mail here. Fact is most of my family, friends and most notably Her Majesty (see next entry) all currently reside there, which collectively necessitates a visit “home” on my part every now and then.

Dilli-Delhi

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In my recent post on the subject of Indian food in Prague, I mentioned that I was looking forward to checking out the new curry house / cocktail bar that has recently opened in Vinohrady, Dilli Delhi. And so yesterday evening my Indian friend Tango Man and I finally headed down for a visit. Tango Man had already been once the previous week, and had apparently really liked the place.

The interior was quite cavernous and plain, which I would not normally mind (back in the UK I’ve invariably found that the quality of the curry is in direct proportion to the dinginess of the surroundings) but for the notable lack of aeration in the main basement dining area. A musty smell permeated as a result, which somehow brought to mind that peculiar odour of stale air and school carpet that anyone who also spent their miserable years of adolescence at a bog-standard British comprehensive will undoubtedly recognise.

Curry House

When reviewing Indian restaurants in Prague, you always have to make allowances for the fact that it’s never going to be this:

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Yep, this is my local – the Sultan Balti Palace on Wokingham’s main town square. You have one, I have one, and chances are it’s not in Prague. Many a happy meal of vegetable shashlik, chicken tikka masala and oversized balti naan were consumed at the Sultan in the ten years before I moved to Prague, and it’s still top of the list of places to visit on the one or two occasions I brave the UK to catch up with friends and family each year.

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Back in the Czech Republic for the other 360 odd days of the year though, where best to scratch the curry itch?

Chanchala

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Call me an uppity food snob if you like, but I have to say that apart from the odd quickie sandwich / coffee on the hoof here and there, I don’t generally like eating in shopping mall restaurants – I just somehow find them pretty impersonal and contrived, and would on the whole prefer to have a meal in a more atmospheric local restaurant instead.

For this reason, despite having literally drunk my weight in chai over the last year at Chanchala, a gaudily decked out Indian restaurant on the top floor of Palladium mall, until today I had never once actually eaten there.

In fact I probably never would have done so at all, had it not been for the one feature of their menu that has long tweaked my interest – namely their selection of dhosas, a crèpe-like speciality of southern India which I used to regularly enjoy as a light lunch when I was living on the subcontinent a few years back.

Ethiopia Café

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I’m sorry, readers, but I cannot tell a lie. In fact I must confess to writing this first “official” restaurant review of this blog so far feeling rather shame-faced on several fronts today.

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Firstly, I ended up at my intended restaurant of review Ethiopia Café accidentally drinking three of these (rýzlink at 72kč per glass) rather than just the intended one – oops…

I wouldn’t like to say this impaired my judgement in any way, but then (moving on to secondary cause of embarrassment) I don’t think it’s entirely unrelated that I ended up easily demolishing literally all of this either:

when on all previous visits I have been consistently defeated by the sheer vastness of the Beyenetu Addis Ethiopian platter (consisting of five Ethiopian meat and vegetable samplers, served on crepe-like injera bread), at 195kč a throw. And what makes it worse is that I didn’t even feel overly full afterwards either…