The PE lamb curry that has me going back for more, every time

Daily Maverick

a day ago

In Richmond Hill, there's a lamb curry that is hard to beat, in a restaurant of rare consistency.
The thing that surprises me most about the Friendly/Windy City is that I never hear locals raving about the superb Indian restaurant right on their doorstep. It's in Richmond Hill, a tiny suburb on a hillside near the sea, and it serves a lamb curry that can hold its own with the best anywhere.
Some lamb curries in a long life of eating them may match the special deboned lamb curry at Royal Delhi, but my memory holds no record of a better one. It's just brilliant. And it's perfectly wonderful every time. The consistency at Royal Delhi is phenomenal.
So is mine. In 10 years of going there — only once in a while, because it's not our home town — I've only ever ordered the 'Royal Delhi Special deboned curried lamb'. Because it's just what I want, and for me it's why we go there. The Foodie's Wife is equally consistent — she consistently avoids ordering the lamb curry so that she can consistently order the chicken and prawn curry instead. Every time.
I also order the same starter every time. It's the puri and patha, which not every palate gets the point of, but I've loved it ever since Devi Moodliar made it for me at the Talk of the Town in Cape Town's Burg Street in the nineties when we were young and carefree.
Puri is a puffed-up round disc of crispy air, but when you push it down with your palm it deflates and compresses. Traditionally, you fry rounds of patha — spicy layered yam leaves smeared with a chilli paste — and pop one on top of a puri, then put a second puri on top of the patha, like a little Indian burger. At Royal Delhi, a trio each of puri and patha are interspersed at a jaunty angle.
It's a proper Indian delight; I adore puri and patha. And it is always on the menu at Royal Delhi. There you go — two secrets you may not have known about PE. (I have another one for you later.)
I like Royal Delhi so much that at one point we considered moving to PE (locals still call it PE, while many alternate between Gqeberha and Port Elizabeth for the full name) so we could live in a cottage in Richmond Hill and go for dinner every week.
Royal Delhi is delightfully old fashioned. It's quite smart in an unfussy way, the table service is exemplary, and the consistency extends as much to the look of the place and the table settings as it does to the food itself. You know what you're in for, and you get what you want. I'm not sure how many restaurants fit that bill.
The menu is more extensive than I usually like in a restaurant — less is best for me, I find — but that doesn't bother me one bit here. There's an on-the-bone alternative to the deboned version, and I had that once and it was equally brilliant. I reckoned I'd get more lamb if there were no bones.
They have Malabar beef curry, Himalayan chicken curry, Madras oxtail, beef tripe curry, and that prawns-and-chicken combo which is not really my thing as I like things to be either one thing or the other. But it's clearly great because the Foodie's Wife knows her curries.
I think I need to go there two nights in a row at some point, so that I can have the lamb curry again and, a day later, the Delhi Durban Prawn Curry — that has to be a treat.
Other starters include very good samoosas, the requisite chilli bites (bhaji/pakora); spiced, fried brinjal slices (had that once, it was great), chicken livers, and a few that don't really fit the Indian restaurant model — calamari frito, escargots in garlic sauce, crumbed mushrooms with tartare sauce, poached mussels and the like.
Are there really people who go to an Indian joint and order poached mussels and lemon butter prawns? I'll stop shaking my head in a minute.
Back to mains: the ones mentioned earlier were just on one page. Alongside that are the North Indian dishes — butter chicken, tikka masala/ korma/ Madras; murgh saagwala (chicken, spinach, garlic), a tandoori half-chicken, butter prawns, lamb rogan josh, and more. Reads like a British High Street Indian menu.
We ordered garlic naan, but you can choose chilli, cheese, chilli-cheese, or plain roti instead. We also ordered jeera (cumin) rice, but others include vegetable pulao, mushroom pulao, plain basmati and steamed yellow rice.
There's a range of tandoori vegetable side dishes as well; the likes of paneer makhani, saag paneer (both cheese), jeera aloo (a favourite of mine, potatoes with cumin), and chana masala (chickpeas cooked in a traditional Punjabi masala).
As with most Indian restaurants, desserts are an afterthought — ice cream with chocolate sauce, créme brûlèe, or maybe a Dom Pedro or Irish coffee — but there is one subcontinental sweet choice: sorgie, a sweetly spiced semolina pudding. It wasn't enthralling. But really, we don't go to the local Indian place for dessert, so who cares.
But I have another secret, although I suspect that to many locals This Is Eat is no secret at all. And maybe they like to keep it to themselves.
If you're new to PE however, take a drive down to the docks and ask someone to direct you to This Is Eat. It's plain and simple. Downhome and humble.
Your food arrives in takeaway bakkies. With a plastic tub of tartare sauce. You order at the counter as you go in, are given a number, and minutes later you'll hear your number called over the intercom. Up you go to collect it, open the lid, and devour the freshest fish imaginable, perfectly grilled or fried, with really top-rate chips on the side (in our case).
I chose grilled kingklip and it was even better than it looked:
The prices are super-friendly, although it's best to choose a pleasant day so that you can sit outdoors where seagulls swoop and a boat of one kind or another may cruise by.
This is the very opposite of Cape Town's Waterfront — essential, real, take-it-or-leave-it simplicity. May it never change. DM