Bombay

Bombay
82 Walton Street
Oxford
OX2 6EA



One of the favourite hangouts of students is Bombay, a reasonably priced and enthusiastically friendly little Bangladeshi restaurant tucked slightly north of where most people frequent, in Oxford.



With a large, and unsurprising, selection of foods available, Bombay caters for the majority of tastes, tending towards a British interpretation of curry. The tandoori dishes here are highly recommended.



Vegetarians are well catered for, with a separate and extensive menu.



Being a BYO restaurant that allows wine (officially. Unofficially, beer and soft drinks are fine as well), we popped round the corner to the Grog Shop, which specialises in a large selection of eclectic world beers, we bought a selection of four ales. Two of them being Trappist beers.



The tandoori chicken was one of their best efforts. Occasionally, their chicken is a miss but usually it was as on this night: moist, tasty, juicy, and a steal at around £3.



The lamb tikka was a slightly smaller portion, but equally delicious with a moist tender flavour, and a good bite - some places marinade bad meat for too long in yoghurt to make it palatable, ending up with the meat having a texture rather like a bath sponge.



A minor quibble, and at this price totally unwarranted, was that the slice of lemon provided had almost no juice, making it irrelevant. The fluorescent-pink sauce and iceberg lettuce garnish were unnecessary, although presumably occupied blank space on the plate.



A's lamb biryani was wonderfully flavoured, with a soft turmeric scent (ha, you think that they use saffron at this price?) and quite acceptable small pieces of lamb.



Quite acceptable, but not great - the lamb was well flavoured but slightly chewy (to me, A thought it was fine), and the dish was a touch drier than I'd expected.



The biryani was served with this vegetable curry. Slightly homogeneous, the curry was mostly meant to lighten the rice dish. One rather pleasant surprise was the use of white radish (mooli, or daikon, depending on your provenance), which had softened, but still retained a slight bite, and a delicious sweetness.



My kofta came as two oversized turds served in a rather disconcerting brown sludge.



Upon closer inspection, they had, in fact, made 'scotch eggs' from the lamb mince, then after cooking had slice the ball in twain, before covering with what turned out to be a rather rich and creamy tomato based curry sauce.



Complimentary basmati rice: we were unsure whether this came standard with the koftas (one suspects on reflection that it does), or that it was served because we were taking photos of all of the dishes, and discussing the food rather animatedly.



A beautifully crisp garlic naan.



Plenty of caramalised spots from the tandoor, giving naan its unique flavour. Nothing from a supermarket baggie, or even your best oven efforts, will compare to this.



Now, we were pretty certain that between us, with two entrees, two mains, and a garlic naan, that we had spent more than £25. A quick bit of math: £3 for the entrees, £9 for the mains, +£2 for the bread comes to £26, ok, fine, that's pretty cheap. However, the Gourmet Society card allows us a 25% discount on this, which should be a discount circa £6 + some pence. For some reason, we were given a discount of £11.15, making this a ridiculously cheap meal of £14.20 for two courses of very good Bangladeshi food each, and around £9 for 4 bottles of fine Trappist beer.

The damage: around £10 per head for two courses, and you can BYO drinks. A steal for such good food.