HOUNSLOW High Street is awash with places to eat at the moment, and with so much competition you might expect restaurants to be at the top of their game.
But my assumptions were certainly challenged when I treated my other half to a meal at Flavors of India, in Hounslow High Street, in mid February.
The restaurant has taken over premises that were formerly the Hounslow branch of Pizza Hut and have retained the distinctive wooden booths and exposed brickwork that give it a cosy, rustic feel.
But it has added its own stamp in the form of a bust of a bright orange Indian truck, at the back of the room as though it has crashed through the wall. It might be a tad unorthodox but it is eye catching as you walk by and probably helps the restaurant to stand out from the crowd.
When we arrived around 7pm half of the restaurant had been cordoned off for a large booking, and we were lucky to find a table before a steady stream of people started arriving and being turned away by staff. Perhaps it was because it was Valentine's Day or just that Flavors is very well placed to attract passing trade, being opposite the Bus Garage.
But I couldn't help thinking that having to turn away customers couldn't be good for business, particularly with so many competitors in close proximity.
My girlfriend had a rose wine for £2.95 and I ordered the Cobra lager, which at £3.25 for a pint is actually very reasonable for the High Street.
The first sign of trouble were the menus – mine was warped, no doubt from absorbing previous customers' spilt drinks, and didn't create a great impression.
Our waiter seemed very anxious to take our order, no doubt because he knew the restaurant was about to get busy, but we did feel under pressure to make up our minds. No sooner had we, then he was nowhere to be found and I spent some time trying hopelessly to catch his eye.
When we finally had a waiter at the table he had forgotten his pad, and had to borrow a sheet of paper from a colleague. Hardly the end of the world, but coming on the back of the menu presentation and the awful litter-strewn, un-swept stairs and corridor leading to the toilet (itself not particularly pleasant) wasn't making for a great first impression.
The wait for the food seemed to take an age, over an hour, it was almost as though the management weren't expecting to be busy, even though this was a Valentine's evening and more people than usual might have been expected to go out to eat.
Just as we had started to think about cutting our losses, paying for our starters and leaving, the main meals finally came. At last! This is where I hoped the evening might turn around. Sadly not so.
I had the Chicken Dum Biryani, a mix of rice and chicken pieces but devoid of vegetables or flavours (unforgivable given the name of the restaurant) and was a little too bland for my tastes.
My girlfriend, who isn't as much of a lover of spicy food as I am, had decided to play safe and had ordered the butter chicken – on the basis that the menu had chillies next to each dish to indicate the strength of them, and the butter chicken had none.
Oddly then it turned out to be a spicy dish, more like a madras I thought, and she asked the waiter for an explanation. He seemed a bit taken by surprise and suggested it was a printing error on the menu – they forgot to draw the chillies on.
My girlfriend asked if she might have a word with the manager and when, after 15 minutes, he had still not come to the table, she was a mission to hunt him down. His take on the spicy butter chicken saga was that the restaurant's main clientèle are people of Indian origin who have a different idea of what constitutes a spicy dish. This seemed mildly insulting, but as we looked around there was clearly a multi-cultural customer base and the manager should have known better.
He was at least very apologetic and offered to cook something else. We didn't take up the offer as it was getting late and we couldn't afford to wait another hour, and our experiences so far hadn't given us much confidence that the food would be worth the wait. He agreed not to charge for the butter chicken, offered to knock a fiver off the bill and give us two traditional Indian ice creams on the house.
I didn't find Flavors of India to my taste and definitely won't go back but it certainly wasn't short on customers so perhaps others might enjoy it more than we did.
