60 Stamford New Road, Altrincham
(0161 929 7484)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £70
Because you care about me, you will be pleased to know that I do actually like eating in restaurants. Because it is something I like doing, most of the time it makes me very happy and an increasing volume of medical research has shown that prolonged and profound happiness is the key to good health. You probably thought that I live my life snout down on the Royal Doulton, because I am an incorrigible glutton. In fact, my restaurant-going is a highly personalised form of therapy. Frankly, Bupa would be well advised to pick up the bills. I'm sure it would turn out cheaper in the long run.
As a result of this pleasure principle, an Indian restaurant like Dilli in Altrincham, which says its food allows you to eat yourself healthier, seems to me to be making pointless claims for itself. For one, I will never choose where I eat for any other reason than the food is supposed to be nice. And secondly, I have no time whatsoever for 'alternative' medicine. Sure, you can dress it up with the mysticism of the ancients, as Dilli does, but it makes no difference to me.
Their menu, they say, is built on the holistic, 5,000-year-old approach of Ayurveda, under which certain ingredients have specific effects on the body: apparently cinnamon attacks headaches, cloves ease toothache, and fennel soothes sore throats. Personally, I find paracetamol does the trick. Of course, bad food genuinely can make you ill. I have no problem with any remedy as long as it's proven to work in a double-blind test. And in a crowded, stressful modern world you are welcome to worship at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster if it makes you feel better. But don't go - literally - trying to stuff it down my throat. I should point out that this is not an invitation to debate; I will not be responding to emails from the ginseng-and-camomile brigade.
So don't expect me to judge Dilli on whether eating there was particularly good for me. Instead, controversially, I will review it as if it were just a restaurant, and by that standard it does pretty well. It is essentially a high street Indian which aspires to be much more than that and in the main succeeds. There's no batch cooking here, nor any long lists of generic westernised curries. The menu reads well, ingredients are fresh, and the sauces have depth and complexity. You know you are on to a good thing when the chutney which comes with the poppadoms is not some over-sweetened gloop which may once have been in the same room as a mango, but a properly spiced and fruity mixture with layers of flavour. Ditto the moreish lime pickle, and another sauce the colour of jade which burst with fresh coriander.
Our starters were the least thrilling part of the meal. Not bad exactly, just underwhelming. A squid stir-fry with one fat scallop was fresh and clean-tasting, but a little underpowered and too heavy on the hot raw red and green peppers of which I've never been a fan. Minced duck samosas were pleasingly spiced, but solid and bulky in what may be an authentic manner. As we know, authentic is not always the same as good.
But our main courses were impressive. I would go back to Dilli just for the generous rack of lamb - chaamp taazdaar - first braised in a liquor rich in clove and cardamom, then marinated in spiced yogurt and finished in the tandoor, to produce sweet, smoky, tender chops, which insisted upon being eaten by hand rather than fork, to pull every last fibre from the bone. A daal makhani of long-cooked black lentils in a sauce of tomatoes, garlic and cream added great lubrication, and a deep-green coconut-rich seafood curry was soft and gentle. We liked the fluffy rice and the fresh breads with their crispy burnt bits, and the way the waiter laughed when we asked to see the dessert menu. Pudding has never been the reason for eating Indian food and it isn't here. It's essentially an assortment of very sweet, very syrupy, nutty things, a surfeit of which might well induce diabetes.
Dilli - it's the original name for Delhi - is owned by chef-restaurateur Kuldeep Singh, who also runs Chowki and Mela in London and who has done much to modernise both the Indian restaurant in Britain and our understanding of the regionality of the country's food.
The clean look here - lots of sandstone and burnt-umber shades, an open kitchen full of leaping flame - signals more than anything the intent as, I suppose, do the prices. Though £35 a head may seem a lot, it's only because we have for too long banished the cooking of the subcontinent into some spurious bargain basement. This is what you need to know: I left Dilli very happy indeed, and since then I have neither died nor developed any form of life-threatening illness. Surely these facts can not be unrelated?
