Bad Indian

This evening friends invited us to a new Indian restaurant in Central, which had been advertising through Groupon. This was the first time I'd encountered Groupon being used in Hong Kong; until now, it's only registered for me as somewhere to get discounts on things I don't want to buy.

The restaurant is on Wyndham Street, graveyard to countless restauranteurs' dreams, brought low by competition and extortionate rents. I get the feeling that when this restaurant closes, it will be an example of Darwinian attrition, not the injustice of high rents.

First off, with only four of us in the restaurant on a Sunday evening, you'd expect the staff to deal with us efficiently, but orders were vaguely registered, if at all, and arrived at the table in no particular order. The naan bread arrived long after everything elser had been eaten, I got everything I'd ordered before anyone else's dishes arrived, and somehow if four of us ordered different drinks, it was impossible in an empty restaurant to remember whod asked for what.

To be fair, perhaps the staff were shell-shocked from the constant blast of middle-of-the-road music from the stereo, at volumes suitable for Saturday night in Lan Kwai Fong, not a quiet Sunday evening. Or the middle-of-the-road noise from the middle of the road - it may be great to live in a thriving metropolis, but it's not so great when the whole of that thriving metropolis is driving past the open front of your restaurant. And maybe they recognised that I haven't been on a plane for two weeks, and was missing having all my food arrive before anyone else's.

So the service was terrible, but the food was at least ... tasteless. The naan bread was a chewy mess, seemingly devoid of the requested garlic, the vegetable samosas were instantly forgettable, and nothing else stood out. It wasn't as if they were executing badly on an overambitious menu - if anything, it was one of the shortest menus I've seen. Two kinds of biryani and no vegetarian option? What's going on?

Still, at least the food was cheap. If by cheap you mean "twice the price of any other Indian restaurant within five minutes' walk". So with all those faults combined, I couldn't see us going back, and that was before they started quibbling about the Groupon vouchers for a fifty dollar difference on the bill. I suppose if you have four people dining in two hours, every penny counts.