Curry Night

So tonight was (one of) CAPA’s traditional curry nights!

Some of the staff, Ciaran, Katie, and Esra, took about 50 of us students to a Bangladeshi curry restaurant in the Brick Lane neighbourhood of London. We got to try some excellent lamb, chicken, and vegetable dishes, with many yummy sides as well. Unfortunately, I was much too concerned with trying everything, so I completely forgot to take pictures! Thankfully, though, the internet will assist me!

I ordered lamb bhuna, which was about a 5/10 on the spicy scale, just how I like it. It had a strong cinnamon taste, and a huge bay leaf sticking out the top, which gave it a nice rounded flavour. It looked something like this:

Kecia got lamb biryani, which was milder spice-wise, but still very nice. It was very similar to this Biryani dish:

In addition, we received some really good side dishes as well. I got an order of aloo bhaji, which consists of soft potato squares cooked with various spices, giving it a warm spiciness, about a 3/10. Kecia got a spinach dish called saag. Supposedly, it was pretty hot:

I didn’t go for the spinach, though the aloo bhaji was very good. It had a dry texture that complemented the saucy curry of my main and a slight taste of mustard seed. Very nice.

We also had plenty of rice and naan to go around, which was great, because naan is the perfect addition to just about anything, curry or otherwise.

Here are pretty close examples of some of the other dishes around our table. (sidenote: we actually sat with the CAPA staff, because they’re closer to our age compared to the other students, so it was nice chatting with them and sharing London stories!)

The pakora, which were served as an appetiser, are crispy onion-like clumps with a kind of vegetable-stuffing inside, and they are tasty. They kept bringing us more because we ate them so quickly, like how you get a seemingly endless supply of the cheddar bay biscuits at Red Lobster. Yeah, it was sort of like that!

There was also this spicy mint sauce. I didn’t catch the name, but it was addictingly yummy. So good.