Telephone: 020 8767 7027
Address: 188 Upper Tooting Road, London SW17
Dinner for two, including drinks and service, £40.
Whenever I write something smarty-pants about vegetarians - 'I don't mind vegetarians, but I couldn't eat a whole one', and so forth - I get inundated with furious letters braying, ironically enough, for my blood. A lot of them are from nine-year-old children. This can be quite scary. I thought, therefore, that the time had come to state my position on vegetarian food, and it is this: I have no interest in dishes which are deemed good in spite of containing no animal protein; I am only interested in vegetarian dishes which are good because they contain no animal protein. A great mushroom risotto, for example, will not be improved by the addition of anything that once had a face. It is perfect in and of itself. A vegetarian moussaka will always benefit from the involvement, at some point in the process, of the abattoir.
The key here is the culinary tradition: French food is built on animal proteins. The cooking of Italy, on the other hand, has great seams of vegetarianism running through it, which is why the dishes work - they are not built on compromise. Likewise India's vegetarian traditions, which are ancient and robust.
Kastoori in Tooting, south London, was established in 1987 by the Thankis, a Gujerati family who also spent time in Uganda. It's an African influence which shows itself in the long list of special dishes. The evening I went it was a dish of bananas in their edible skin, the soft sweetness of which was a foil to the butch, spicy tomato-based sauce they sat in. That construction stands as a good example of the complexities teased here from banal ingredients.
The same should be said of our starters. The speciality are the puri, gravity-defying crisp puffs filled with mixtures of diced potatoes, chickpeas and what tasted like a sweet tamarind-based sauce. They have to be eaten whole and at once before they collapse; the menu calls them 'taste bombs' and I can do no better. I also loved the samosas with their fragrant, cinnamon-spiked filling, a rich main-course curry of panir cheese stuffed with mint and coriander in a lush cashew and melon-seed sauce, and a dense, earthy stew of mung beans.
The room, like so many of the Indian vegetarian restaurants in this part of Tooting, is simple save for a few wall sculptures. The service is warm and efficient and the bill is breathtakingly small, as you might expect of a place where the most expensive single dish costs £5.75. Has Kastoori converted me to vegetarianism? No. I still like things to die for my dinner. But it has converted me to Tooting.
