09. Lihiniya

Lihiniya
66 Cricklewood Broadway
020 8208 2658

Gourmand writes: With no staff in sight, we edged towards the back of the restaurant. Surely somebody worked at Lihiniya? Eventually, a confused-looking woman emerged from the kitchen.

"Can I help you?" she asked.
"We'd like to order food, please."
"Khana Indian restaurant is next door."

It's never a good sign when a restaurateur assumes you've gone to the wrong place.

"No, we don't want Indian food. We want Sri Lankan food."
"Not now. We're about to go out"

It was 7pm on a Saturday. There was a pause.

"What food do you want?"
"Hoppers, string hoppers," I replied.
"OK, no problem," she said, gesturing towards a table.

I hope I'm not making our host sound unpleasant. She was polite and sweet, but it still felt like we'd unwittingly stumbled into her private residence. Unopened envelopes and crumpled napkins sat on the tables and at the back of the restaurant there were a couple of chairs, a computer and a load of videos. This was their living room.

Twenty minutes later a large tray of food arrived. String hoppers (rice noodle pancakes), egg hoppers (bowl-shaped rice flour pancakes cooked with an egg), coconut and seeni (sweet onion) sambols, and lamb and chicken curries. The meat wasn't fantastic, but for £5 each it was a bargain.

"I thought you had the wrong restaurant," our hostess chuckled as we settled the meagre bill.
"No, we like Sri Lankan food," I replied, hoping Gormless wouldn't reveal we had to visit Lihiniya as it was the next restaurant on the street.

Oh, Lihiniya. Insecure, confused Lihiniya. Here's some advice from the Gullets lads. Design a menu. Put up a new sign or two. Don't be so scared of customers. Have some self-belief. Look deep inside yourself and you'll find an real-life restaurant just bursting to get out. You can do it. We know you can.
6.5/10

Gormless writes: I'm sorry to demystify the Gullets process, but this was not our first visit to Lihiniya. We called into the restaurant a couple of weeks ago to see when the advertised Hopper Night took place. In the course of our conversation it became apparent that Lihiniya staged a nightly paradox: every evening is Hopper Night, yet Hopper Night never occurs. There are never any customers to make it happen. On Saturday night we turned years of on-standby hopper readiness into a real, existing meal situation.

I have been to a Hopper Night once before. It was a high concept mishmash of Easy Rider (starring Dennis Hopper), space hoppers and pogo sticks. This one was all about the pancake or noodle-style bases we were invited to combine with curry and other dishes into a layered meal. I enjoyed ripping fragments from my egg hopper and pinching chicken bits with them.

We sat on the lower of two levels. The eating area was dressed to host a Christmas wedding. The higher level featured a neglected beach bar. The whole place is like an installation designed to illustrate themes of abandonment, neglect, potential… that sort of thing. Yet, we roused this dormant operation and it delivered. Fine Sri Lankan music filtered through the PA, the bewildered staff turned chatty and the food was very good and very cheap. Truly, this is the kind of eventual eating the Gullets team thrives upon.

7/10

Overall score: 13.5/20

The Sri Lankans enter joint third place with Mango Grills

08. Mango Grills

Mango Grills
58 Cricklewood Broadway
020 8450 9999

Gourmand writes: It may surprise you to learn that I, Gourmand, have my detractors. These critics allege I'm not the food expert my pen name suggests. On a handful of obscure sub-Saharan cookery techniques these jealous fools may have a point, but challenge me on my command of the Arabic kitchen and I'll point to numerous case studies demonstrating my commitment to my research. I've eaten whole sheep's heads, raw livers, sheep's testicles and enough raw lamb to red carpet next month's Academy Awards. Having eaten at hundreds of Lebanese restaurants, including the best places in Beirut, I can confirm that Mango Grills is, well, a little above average.

Sadly for me, there are no adventurous dishes on the menu (what, no bollocks?), and the two dishes I really wanted (muhammara and fried kebbeh) weren't available. The unavailability of the former is understandable - it's a Syrian dish - but no fried kibbeh? Not good.

But apart from a soggy, microwaved lamb sambousek, the food we ordered was very good. Sorry to harp on about my impeccable credentials, but I've eaten more hommus than Terry Waite and am confident that Mango Grills' creamy, tangy 'Beiruty' version, with hot peppers and parsley, belongs up there with the best of them. The warak inab (stuffed vine leaves) were perky, fresh and sweet, the fattoush bristled with mint, onion and sumac, and the beef sujok (spicy sausages) were delicious too.

As with finished the meal with gloriously good baklava, I looked round the empty restaurant and wished Mango Grills had more customers. It's a clean, if rather bare, place with friendly service and reasonable pricing - we paid £15 for two. Just don't expect any (nasty) surprises.
7/10

Gormless writes:
How Gourmand has changed my life, Part #2567. On the morning of the day that would conclude with this meal I woke up in a gay art house. Before I started collaborating on this blog I would be more likely to target such an establishment with stones and spray paint than sleep in it.

I mention this for two reasons. First: I nursed a giant hangover throughout the day, which may prejudice this review. Second: Well, waking up in a gay art house and eating dinner in a Lebanese restaurant is some sort of bohemian dream, isn't it? In fact, I think you can buy it as one of those 'experience' days in Debenhams. Fuck that, ladies and gentleman. Here I am, living it!

On closer examination, however, my narrative collapses. There was only one gay in the house and the art was at best mediocre and at worst articles cut out of Metro. The Lebanese restaurant was called Mango Grills and had no atmosphere, nor customers to speak of. Indeed, in terms of restaurants we have visited so far it was most reminiscent of Mr Chan's - never a glowing comparison - because it functioned largely as a takeaway.

So geared were they towards over-the-counter service they even managed to 'take away' two of the menu options we wanted to order. We persevered and managed to order the decent mezze Gourmand has described to you above. For me, the only weak dish was the sambousek, which looked and tasted like a Birds Eye rendition of the Lebanese favourite. Our host was knowledgeable and personable, and happily gave us a big jug of tap water.

The moral of this review? Next time someone boasts to you about their gay art house/Lebanese restaurant 'experiences', remember that the reality often fails to live up to the billing. Good service, discretion and efficient transactions are all you can really expect from either.

6.5/10

Overall score 13.5/20

Mango Grills cruises into the bronze medal position

07. The Windmill Gastropub

The Windmill Gastropub

57 Cricklewood Broadway, 020 8450 4270

Gourmand writes: "You're more likely to find a synagogue in Gaza City," I wisecracked when I first heard rumours of a gastropub in Cricklewood. And, naturally enough, The Windmill is about as much of a gastropub as Gormless is a gourmand.

To be fair, we didn't eat from the gastropub menu, although this wasn't our fault. We presented my Taste London card, which is meant to get me half-price food, but it was rejected by the (very pleasant) woman behind the bar after she called her boss to check, and five minutes after she told us it would be fine. Not her fault at all, but by glancing into the open kitchen and listening to the whirr of the deep-fryer we got a strong feeling that ordering the pork belly would be a mistake.

There are two rooms at The Windmill - a quiet dining room totally lacking in atmosphere and a pub with football on big screens you can't see from most of the seats. We sat in front of an Everton game and ordered from the bar food menu. The food was poor and crazily overpriced. The nachos were puny tortilla chips with bargain basement salsa and a tiny portion of melted cheese; criminally guacamole was nowhere to be seen. My sausage sandwich was even worse. A single sliced sausage was presented in limply toasted rye bread with a few scraps of salad. We'll go back and eat from the main menu when they decide to accept my card, but after such pathetic pub grub our expectations are very low.
3/10

Gormless writes: If The Windmill had a description of their perfect customer, he would probably resemble me. For I am proud I choose FHM over Nuts, I tend to dress 'smart-casual' and not in sports gear and I look down on Wetherspoon's as a populist snare. I am also the kind of gormless twat who is content to sit in a low-concept gastropub and order overpriced food to accompany a neck-craning football 'experience'. Truly The Windmill and other pubs of its ilk have me stitched up: flatter my good taste and then present me with a weighty bill.
I had a plate of nachos while Gourmand suffered a sausage sandwich. The chef was more interested in flirting with the waitress then in preparing our food and both dishes - hard to get either that wrong - suffered. My nachos lacked the guacamole that's their birthright while Gourmand received a single sliced sausage for his outlay. We may return for full meals, but these items on the pub menu were very poor.

3/10

Overall score: 6/20
A rubbish effort by The Windmill

06. The Beaten Docket

The Beaten Docket
50-56 Cricklewood Broadway, 020 8450 2972

Gourmand writes: "This country. It's getting worse all the time," moans the corpse at the bar. "It could be worse," replies the corpse to his left. "It could be Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe."

At its best, this JW Wetherspoon pub is a place where sixty-something male alcoholics congregate to drink real ale and moan about the state of things today. At its worst, it's a place where lonely, depressed sixty-something inebriates sit alone, stare at the wall, shuffle in their chair occasionally, stumble home at midnight and return the next morning to do the whole thing again. Whether they're angrily lamenting "Brown's Broken Britain", sipping the head of a Goffs Merlin (4.3% ABV) or dribbling down their chin dementedly while arguing with their dead wives, everyone's foaming at the mouth at this undeservedly popular old people's home.

There's no background music or sports TV at Wetherspoons, which means you can hear your fellow customers dying. The man sitting behind us summons every ounce of strength to keep his nose from drooping in his pint glass. The tinsel and glitter adorning the walls seem wholly inappropriate. It's Christmastime at the morgue.

The food is cheap. Straight from the packet, cooked from frozen. The tortilla chips with salsa are passable, as is my sweet potato, chick pea and spinach curry, although the naan bread is cold and tough. It's his birthday, so I treat Gormless to a 'gourmet' burger (a poor man's burger with extra cheese and bacon). The meat is tough, chewy and miserable. You get what you pay for.

There's a silver lining. As Gormless completes another journey round the sun and joins me on the precipice of a fourth decade, we bask in the glory of being the youngest people in The Beaten Docket by at least 20 years. Worth a toast, I think.
5/10

Gormless writes: Five restaurants in and I think now is a good time to pay tribute to Gourmand. He has introduced me to new cuisines from around the world on my doorstep. Nigerian, Persian, Ethiopian… what, I wondered, would he have in store for me on my birthday?

It was Wetherspoons. I’m not complaining, but a night spent dodging the despairing glances of broken men is the kind of ‘experience’ I look to my patron to liberate me from. I fell in, though, and in a desperate play for finesse ordered the gourmet burger with its predictable chip and onion ring companions. It was all barely serviceable stodge enlivened by conversation and fellow diner speculation; all washed down with super cheap gin and tonic. I had some of Gourmand’s chick pea curry. It was borderline fine.

It was a night at Wetherspoons. What would you expect?
5.5/10

Overall score: 10.5/20
The best pub so far, out of one

05. D'Den

D'Den
47 Cricklewood Broadway, 020 8830 5000

Gourmand writes: I've often wondered what's behind those tinted windows. There's a clue in D'Den's charmingly home-cooked videos on YouTube, in which owner, head chef and all-round Cricklewood micro-celebrity Balo talks enthusiastically about the "governors, senators, footballers - all walks of life" that make up his restaurant's clientele. Tonight, I hoped, we'd spy on top-ranking Abuja officialdom - and maybe even Efan Ekoku - mired in a D'Den of sleaze.

I've had Nigerian food before and it wasn't great. Ferocious spicing annihilated any subtleties of flavouring, the meat was chewy and the sauces glooped weirdly like hot mozzarella. We avoided gloop on this occasion due to D'Den's confusing menu. Every dish appears to be a soup; these cost around £6, but don't include meat (£5 extra for goat, for example). We're hardly Nigerian oligarchs, so we asked our server if she could give us a selection of the country's cuisine for £25. Baffled, she nudged us in the direction of grilled fish, fried plantain and jollof rice - what everyone else there was eating.

The croaker was char-grilled to perfection, with either a hint or a hurricane or spiciness depending on how much of the accompanying, debilitating salsa ended up on the fork. The jollof rice (with spices and tomatoes) and fried plantain were both tasty, but unexciting. We watched TV ads promoting seatbelts and condoms in Lagos, and, disorientatingly, D'Den on Cricklewood Broadway; drank Star Beer, brewed in Lagos; and eventually met Balo, who was as nice as he appears on the internet. It was an evening without sleaze, though, until a prostitute introduced herself to us on the street just outside Mr Chan's.
6/10

Gormless writes: D’Den promised the kind of dining experience this blog was made for. Not only is the Nigerian cuisine exotic, but the premises are strikingly unfamiliar. Blacked out windows, a lion logo, blood red lettering, goat stew; these features combined to raise it above its competitors in my imagination. My expectations built D’Den into something it could not live up to. For these days any food outside of the Sainsbury’s Basics range is strange to me; any venue other than my poorly-lit room a blessed relief. Lo! How the gormless have fallen.

Upon entering D’Den, most of my illusions were undermined. It was a restaurant like any other; albeit one in love with its own on-screen advertisements and raucous enough to be a social club. The menu was so confusing we asked our waitress to pick for us and, when she declined, we fell into copying our neighbours in ordering a big, dirty-looking fish. They appeared to eat the whole thing, including the head, bones and plate, and after a long wait we were primed to do the same. The grilled choaker was served with jollof rice, plantain and some chilli sauce that certainly made it a memorable meal (masking its dubious quality). I drank some Nigerian Star beer and enjoyed pulling the requisite poses with the complementary toothpick.

This is my first Gullets review to take the ‘longer view’. The morning after I woke up sick and suspect the fish may have been to blame. A mark off for that - the one that was added mid-meal when D’Den honcho Balo entered and demonstrated his extreme affability.
6/10

Overall score: 12/20
Nigeria lies second out of two in Cricklewood's African Cup of Nations

04. Persia Restaurant

Persia Restaurant
45 Cricklewood Broadway, 020 8452 9226

Gourmand writes: Christmas arrived early this year. The fairy lights draped along Persia Restaurant's walls and windows glistened with festive spirit, but it's the friendly service, good value menu and excellent food that makes this Cricklewood's winter wonderland.

The mezze special, a £10 platter of starters, was almost enough to sate us. We started with sabzi (fresh mint and basil, walnuts and feta cheese), warm flatbread and fantastically thick, creamy hummos. The chicken livers zinged with fennel, the borrani esfenaj was a piquant aubergine dip, and the salad olivieh was, rather less exotically, a solid rendition of the potato salad. The only disappointment was the kashk-e-bademjan, one of my favourite Middle Eastern dishes. I like it when it's made with plenty of kashk (fermented whey) and has a deep, smoky taste. We shared a main course, the chello chengeh kebob, cooked to perfection with a juicy saffron marinade and a blushing red centre. Doogh, a carbonated yogurt drink, seemed to alienate Gormless, but he enjoyed the falooda, a weird but wonderful desert of rosewater and frozen vermicelli.

Despite spending much of the evening fending off daft questions from an irritating couple who made Gormless look well-informed ("do you serve sushi here?"), our host was smiley and chatty without being intrusive. Extra points for the BYOB policy and the two-for-one voucher that came with our £26 bill, and I'll be back for the belly dancing and live music on Saturday nights. With or without the fairy lights - Persia Restaurant shines.
8/10

Gormless writes: Gormless I may be, but I am as capable as being moved by delicate beauty as the next man. So long as the next man is not Wazzo, that is, who only really likes big tits. As we ate in the workaday environs of Pink Rupee I glanced across to our next stop and was charmed by its interior of twinkling fairy lights. Since then, Persia Restaurant had grown in my imagination. I anticipated dusky Middle Eastern beauties pouring wine from bottomless jugs, soft music, an ambience; everything that had been missing from the restaurants so far. Was I disappointed? A little, yes.

Persia Restaurant is certainly a well maintained, pleasant space, but it fell away from my romantic image. The fairy lights were joined by loads of lamps and bulbs that combined to over-illuminate everything. Our waitress was less the enigmatic temptress of lore and more a bright, engaging presence who played the lady-gourmand and guided me through the menu. We started with mezzeh - six dishes including chicken livers and potato salad, eaten in combination with bread. This tasty pick 'n' mix was followed by a kebab that had no pita and no skewer, simply beautifully cooked lamb chunks with rice. We drank doogh, a yoghurt drink I failed to acquire the taste for, and finished with falooda; rosewater ice flakes with thin stands of vermicelli.

There is no doubting the quality of the fare on offer at Persia Restaurant, but I expected a bit more than a night making the noises you make at a good restaurant. Perhaps it was the lumpen fellow diners, perhaps the distracting plasma screen… I don't know, but the night lodged at the level of a dully familiar restaurant trip and never really got off as an adventure, culinary or otherwise.
7/10

OVERALL SCORE: 15/20

In a clash of restaurants with pre-WWII country names, Abyssinia leads Persia by a precious half-point!

03. Pink Rupee

Pink Rupee, 38 Cricklewood Broadway, 020 8452 7665

Gourmand writes: Our expectations fell dramatically the moment we entered the restaurant. Tinny, noisy and hugely irritating Hindi pop leaked from the kitchen through an open door, a jarring racket that continued throughout the meal. It was like 4am at a minicab office in Archway.

The plastic flowers on the wall seemed to be dying; the Nepalese tourism posters next to them were yellowing. Pink Rupee (not as in 'pink pound' - we ruled out homosexual involvement when we saw the decor) is 23 years old, our mop-headed waiter told us, but it isn't growing old gracefully. For its 25th birthday I'll buy the owner a tub of paint and the chef some headphones.

The words 'Nepalese Tandoori Restaurant' are printed on the front of the menu, but our waiter, who must be bored of the view by now, confessed that only a few dishes would be found in Kathmandu. One of these was our starter, momo (pictured) - steamed, spicy and very tasty minced beef dumplings. The main courses were also solid. We're not convinced it's an authentic dish, but the fish nepal, in a cream and mango sauce, combined well with a sprightly lamb bhuna, pilao rice, naan bread and imported Nepalese beer. All perfectly good (if a bit pricey at £26 for two). We'll get it delivered next time...

6/10

Gormless writes: When Gourmand said our next stop showed football and encouraged a "bit of a smoke", I thought we were going round Wazzo's for a night in. I was wrong, but so was my patron, for the Arabic 'café' serves only hot drinks and shisha. No food, no review; and Gourmand's disappointment was obvious. I could tell he wanted a night being jostled by boisterous young things arguing loudly over nothing.

Thank god, then, that the next venue was an Indian; a night in which is a lynchpin of the 'chav culture' he so covets. I say Indian, but it was more Nepalese, or at least it was at the start before switching to Indian, but what's the difference anyway? Not much according to our waiter who said the distinction lay in the intensity of the spicing. Nepalese grub is cooler, apparently, because of all the snow, or something. I didn't follow his entire lesson as his perfect mop-top hair distracted me. We started with Nepalese beer and momo, a meat-stuffed dumpling perfect to put in your bumbag for a mountain hike and very tasty. We followed this with lamb bhuna, fish Nepal, rice and naan - all fine but not particularly memorable, especially compared to the taste vistas glimpsed at Abyssinia.

This restaurant has been here for 23 years, so it is no surprise that it's tired. The atmosphere was undermined by the past-caring, exposed kitchen, which allowed a tinny Here Comes the Hot-Stepper to compromise our enjoyment. It was not exactly buzzing, either, more a venue for blokes to bore/annoy one another. Good food, though, and somewhat unlucky to come after Abyssinia. I'm sure I would find a lot more to praise if it followed Chicken Spot or Euro Net.

6.5/10

OVERALL SCORE 12.5/20

A respectable result for Pink Rupee. Might qualify for the UEFA Cup.