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Indian Cafe Racer on Bristol Street, Birmingham, spent its fledgling years tucked behind a curtain at the back of the Duke of Wellington pub just a few doors up from its fancy new home. There was a Royal Enfield motorcycle, chequerboard floors and a psychedelic Indian soundtrack, but this small, homespun spot from Azad Kayes quickly became culty, then oversubscribed, then in need of a bigger home. It’s a good news tale for the Brum food scene.
For those who remember it, south Birmingham’s Balti triangle once ran to 30 bustling restaurants along Ladypool Road and Stratford Road. Only two now remain. Something has gone amiss with supply and demand.
Indian Cafe Racer, meanwhile, has enough fans for a new, 65-cover, grown-up restaurant, serving an ever-changing menu that, when we visited, featured shaktiman and salad (named after an Indian comic-book superhero), gol gappa (crisp shells filled with chickpeas and potato), chicken pepper fry and grilled aubergine and portobello mushrooms, known as farzi steak. Indian Cafe Racer’s papdi chat is enough to feed the hordes, as well as ‘excite the desi-food disciple’. Kayes dips into Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata, with a scattering of Indo-Chinese small plates: gobi manchurian (fried cauliflower in sweet-and-sour sauce) and chilli chicken, say.
The cocktail bar serves cold, potent liveners with names such as Angry Young Man, Red Carpet and Tiger Rides Bike, alongside endless karak chai , a heavily spiced, very sweet, milky tea brewed strong with cardamom and condensed milk. Jump on our Cafe Racer, the menu says, and let us give you a mast taste of India. No visa required.
In fact, the new Indian Cafe Racer has about it a sprinkling of Dishoom : paper menus with faux-olde font, wipeable tables and functional rather than fancy-pants hospitality. The room is elegant with small dashes of eccentricity, and there’s a sense that, in its expansion, some of its silliness has been tidied away. The large glass windows face on to the realities of a dual carriageway, and the room errs on the dark side.
Still, the welcome is warm and we kick off with a round of dahi puri : crisp, plump, puffed flour shells filled with potato, sweet yoghurt, tamarind and mint chutney. We know the drill: eat them in one, though these ones are so large and so liquidy that there’s a fine line between extreme pleasure and being legally waterboarded. Recovering, we move on to chicken 65, named, depending on who you ask, after its position on a Chennai hotel menu in 1965 (other origin stories are available) – fried with curry leaves, green chillies and arguably a little too much mustard seed.
A round of spiced lamb chops – two cutlets a portion, marinated overnight and finished in the tandoor – are genuinely succulent. ‘Crowd-pleaser’: Indian Cafe Racer’s gulab jamun . The tandoori king prawns in house masala are lovable, zinging with crushed ginger and sticky with honey, while the Rajastani lamb is a standout: slow-cooked and finished with smoked charcoal and butter.
The increasingly ubiquitous dal makani arrives deeply and sweetly rich in its creamy tomato sauce, but the naans are a bit thin and functional. Indian Cafe Racer’s cooking is sometimes bang on, sometimes a little slapdash, but then the likes of gobi manchurian pique your interest all over again. If cocktails feel too much by this point, there’s always a cold Bombay Bicycle IPA.
Cafe racers were the lads who raced motorbikes such as that Royal Enfield , which was once made in nearby Redditch, between roadside cafes in the 60s. Today, Royal Enfield is made in Chennai. The bike went from the edge of Birmingham to India, and this restaurant closes the circle.
Arguably, with Indian Cafe Racer’s mature new home, some of the spirit of foot-to-the-pedal mayhem has been lost. Still, it opens every day (including Monday), if you have a horde to feed it will make a huge fuss of your group, and there’s enough choice to excite the desi food disciple who wants Rajastani lamb and mango machli , without spooking the horses if you’re with Sheila who “doesn’t do” spice – she can have the paneer makani. Indian Cafe Racer is well worth a ride, and maybe even a return ticket.
Indian Cafe Racer 88-90 Bristol Street, Birmingham B5, 0121-238-7972 Open lunch Wed-Sun, noon-4.30pm, dinner all week, 5-11pm. From about £30 a head à la carte, plus drinks & service
Source: The Guardian
