When The Cinnamon Club opened in 2001, its proposition was contentious: Indian food belonged at the serious end of the British dining table. Today, it hardly requires discussion. London has Indian restaurants of world-class ambition in almost every conceivable format. Scroll back 25 years, though, and shifting Indian cooking from the curry house pigeonhole into the fine-dining conversation took nerve, money and no small amount of dogged persistence.
The vast old Westminster Library makes a fitting arena. Cream walls, high ceilings and generous space between the tables give the room a stately calm. The original bookcases still stand sentry, witnesses to decades of Parliamentary gossip. It has the authority of a room where important things have happened.
They still do. Clove-smoked Anjou pigeon breast arrives beautifully pink, its spicing nuanced and layered, teamed with a crisp leg meat roll. A constellation of accompaniments makes for a busy plate, but nothing here is ornamental: sweet, spiced pumpkin, bright beetroot raita, crunchy peanut.
Balmoral Estate venison goes bigger, beautifully cooked and cloaked in a rich, bitter, smoky sauce deepened by kalpasi and dried lime. Leaning on the staff’s near-encyclopaedic knowledge, a full-bodied Portuguese red blend elevates complex spicing: weight for the meat, pepper and spice to keep pace. Black tiger prawns in Ashadi-spiced yoghurt take things somewhere lighter; fire-flecked and just-glassy, sharpened with lemon and matched with rice vermicelli.
Game, seafood, and big-impact dishes might be the headliners, but vegetarian dishes hit just as hard. Bombay pao bhaji is a case in point: steaming and fragrant, with a sliver of creamy burrata melting over the meticulously diced vegetables. Served with a dinky pao bun, we make it disappear with alarming speed.
Dessert is a silky chocolate marquise crowned with a thatch of kataifi, its richness cut by coffee sorbet and the brittle sweetness of peanut chikki. If there is a gripe, it’s that the sorbet could have more heft; regardless, that generous, luxe chocolate makes a formidable finish.
Given the room, ingredients and a quarter-century spent at the upper end of Indian dining, it’d be easy to charge a fortune for the pleasure. It doesn’t. Mains average around £29, but wines by the glass start at £7.80 and starters from £9.50; it feels fair. This isn't Indian cooking made grand; it’s British produce given the full glamour of Indian spicing. Twenty-five years on, The Cinnamon Club hasn’t lost its edge.