Namak, St Werburgh’s: ‘Laboriously monotonous’ – restaurant review

It’s a dark, mild evening when I cross the M32 footbridge towards St Werburgh’s. The twinkling lights of Mina Road are always enticing and atmospheric, especially when paired with a reggae beat blaring out of a nearby car window. For such a bustling spot for shoppers, farm-goers, residents and beer drinkers, St Werb’s has surprisingly little in the way of restaurants. I’m intrigued to see if this new opening is worthy of this eccentric and effortlessly cool corner of Bristol.

Namak is a new Indian on the site previously occupied by the Cauldron. With such a well-reviewed and locally-loved predecessor, it’s got a lot to live up to. The interior has changed very little from its Cauldron days; the mural of the English countryside with its red squirrel, fox and boar looks somewhat out of place now.

The menu holds promise; some of the classics you’d expect to see in a British curry house but also some less familiar and more intriguing items. Starters begin at £5 and mains at £12, with sides to be ordered separately.

To start: lahsooni scallops and prawn (£10) and masala white bait (£7.50). The prawns were promisingly crunchy, spicy and delicious but small and there was only two of them. The scallops were buried under a fantastic curry sauce, but upon digging them out I was slightly disappointed to find they were rather wet and needed a longer sear in the pan. The masala white bait would have been right at home in a branch of a Greene King pub. They were tasty but the masala was not apparent at all. There was a lot of them, and after a few it became laboriously monotonous.

The starters at Namak looked interesting on the menu but didn’t quite live up to expectations. Photo: Meg Houghton-Gilmour

Despite feeling somewhat underwhelmed by the starters, I held out hope for the mains. We were recommended rajasthani lamb curry (£13), which we had with a masala chicken dosa (£12), zafrani pulao rice (£3) and a garlic naan (£3).

The lamb, advertised as ‘inspired by the royal kitchens of Rajasthan’ was chunks of tender meat in a fairly standard tomato-based sauce. It was a perfectly enjoyable dish but didn’t strike me as regal. If this is what is being served in the royal kitchens of Rajasthan it would appear their situation isn’t dissimilar to that of our own sovereignty. It didn’t seem to be a curry that had had love and time poured into it, as I had hoped.

A lamb curry should be the epitome of luxury and flavour – sadly this wasn’t! Photo: Meg Houghton-Gilmour

The masala chicken dosa was also having something of an identity crisis – the dosa itself was commendable – crisp and light – but the filling was uninspiring. It was served with a daal with chunky bits of carrot and green beans; alarmingly similar in appearance to a Heinz chunky veg soup.

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The garlic naan was buttery, coated in ample pungent garlic and coriander.

The rice was, well, rice. You didn’t come here to read about rice.

So far the best thing about the meal was the sauce on the scallops – that was excellent. That was the kind of sauce you want to order a whole extra naan bread just to mop up, a sauce that you want to order so much of that you have to take it home and sneakily eat it cold from the fridge in the middle of the night.

For dessert we tried the chocolate samosa (£4.50) for the novelty. What arrived was an apt conclusion to the meal. Two small samosas with a couple of pieces of delicately blow-torched banana and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. They’d used dark chocolate so it wasn’t sickly, but it was underwhelming. Perhaps they thought that only children would order a chocolate samosa (ha! My therapist says I need to nurture my inner child more, I’m not sure she meant via the medium of chocolate samosas) and thus it doesn’t need to be anything interesting or special. It was crying out for an injection of personality or texture. Some nuts, some seductive dark fruits, spices. Anything to make it feel like I hadn’t just eaten a filo-wrapped advent calendar plucked out the freezer and deep fried just shy of being warm in the middle.

Chocolate samosas were a fun novelty but decidedly average. Photo: Meg Houghton-Gilmour

My expectations for Namak were very high. Perhaps if I’d known I was going to a standard curry house they would’ve been met. But I wasn’t – I was going to Namak, in the glorious St Werburghs, in what used to be the Cauldron, a restaurant opened by Harris Massey who has the reputable Dishoom amongst others on his CV. The menu was exciting, the achari tandoor ducks (£14) were all in a row – this restaurant has greatness well within its grasp.

Being the eternal glass half-full (of a crisp Romanian pinot grigio) person that I am, I remain very optimistic for Namak. The idea is there and it’s solid, but it needs better execution if it is to compete with the likes of Urban Tandoor and its copious awards and with the infallible curry scene in Easton only a 10 minute walk away.

I look forward to returning in a few months for another go. To have the transportive magic of Dishoom-level cooking in the heart of St Werburgh’s really would be something to write home about. For now though, I think I’ll stick to the samosas on this side of the footbridge.

Namak, 98 Mina Road, Bristol, BS2 9XW

www.namakdining.com

Main photo: Meg Houghton-Gilmour

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