The Dishoom Home Feast more than lives up to its name

Over the course of the lockdown, we’ve done a fair few home deliveries from a selection of restaurants ranging from very top-end to pretty mid-range.

Some have been decent, some not so great, and others we’ve simply done as a means of helping out a sector that has been stretched to the limits by the complete cessation of business.

Of them all, by far the most enjoyable was the Dishoom Home Feast, although there is a very important caveat, which is that I didn’t prepare it. Virtually all of the previous deliveries were mercifully easy to prepare, with most needing nothing more than an ability to turn on the oven.

The Dishoom Home Feast was a conspicuous exception, with the whole meal taking just over an hour to prepare and cook. Most of that was chopping vegetables and putting things on skewers (which are provided), although preparing the roti verged on baking, and the timings have to be quite sharp for everything to be ready at the same time. The pack contained excellent illustrated instructions on how to prepare each dish, but it would, it was noted pointedly (and blithely ignored), been far easier if two of us had been doing the hard yakka in the kitchen.

The result, however, was superb. Dishoom is one of our family’s favourite venues (my daughter chose it for her twenty-first birthday) and the home feast is every bit as good as the food in the restaurant. To start there’s a big bottle of mango lassi, followed by an excellent selection of favourites from the restaurant. There’s bhel, lamb sheesh kebab, murgh malai, mattar paneer, black daal, kachumber and tawar roti, with gulkand mess (an Indian variation on Eton Mess) to round off.

It was, in short, an unexpectedly wonderful feast, and there was plenty of it. It is sold as a meal for two, but when the two twentysomethings smelled enticing wafts coming from the kitchen they hung around until finally, and reluctantly, invited to join the fray.

In truth there was just about enough for four people, with the consensus that absolutely every dish was outstanding. With a price tag of £60, which includes a Dishoom tea towel (or £80 if you insist on having a bottle of sparkling, which we didn’t) this is really good value – especially if you don’t have to do the cooking.

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