Please note that since writing this blog post, Namaskar has closed down
I’m having trouble blogging at the moment. For the past month, I’ve had two things in my mind: they both begin with A and have the same number of letters. (I just realised that today.) The work-related A-word I’ve decided not to talk about on here – when I have so many colleagues potentially reading this, I need to keep business and pleasure apart. The other I guess I could talk about, but we haven’t been on many dinner dates. And besides – seeing his name here could freak him out.
You might think this means I could just write about the damned food, right?
Wrong. It doesn’t seem to work like that. You know me and my angles – I need one. They rarely come from food itself; they come from life. And suddenly my life seems to be one big confidentiality agreement.
I needed to think about something else. It was Monday. I’d worked hard. It was raining – the kind of rain that warns you that winter is just round the next corner… I was meeting a friend I hadn’t seen since early summer – before either A-word was even a blip on the horizon. We needed to talk. And for that we needed red wine and curry.
Namaskar does not have the most salubrious of décor, but it does have the advantage of being about equidistant between my house and my office. It’s also easy to get a table, despite having a good reputation on Iens. We ordered a bottle of light, drinkable Beaujolais, and set to the task of Catching Up.
Mid chat, our chicken jaipuri and lamb mughalai arrived. I don’t think I’ve ever had jaipuri before, and I’m not sure I will again – it’s very sweet from an overload of mango chutney. But I trust that’s the way it’s supposed to be. The mughalai was much more to my taste – medium hot with some fragrance from fenugreek leaves and coriander. The rice and naan were all much of a muchness, as were the poppadoms at the beginning. But at €45 for two people, we were more than satisfied. In fact, I was especially satisfied since Luke paid…
Needless to say, our dinner conversation revolved around work and our love lives, which meant it didn’t exactly take my mind off my two A-words. But the curry and the catch-up certainly improved my Monday.
