After a hard day in July moving house we were too tired to celebrate my birthday properly, so ended up falling into the Sutton Tandoori.

Everyone in The Cambridge Curry Community knows my feels on Sutton Tandoori, so I’ll keep it short.

I’ve been here half a dozen times before and each time has been disappointing, other than one off excellent meal. This one excellent meal has been enough for me to keep trying it in case my local Indian somehow turns fantastic again.

I want to believe, I really do.

It’s a 2 minute walk from my house and to have something amazing round the corner would be really special but unfortunately it falls flat once again.

The meat was what let it down. Generally speaking the sauce was ok. My lamb just felt basic, Megan didn’t enjoy get duck at all, and though I heard no complaints from Jack…he’d eat anything if you called it a curry.

The service was really good here and the place is quite charming in its own way. It’s essentially a terraced house they’ve turned into a restaurant, which I’ve always liked.

The menu is an average price with a really good selection of dishes but the real winner for me is the fact you can bring your own alcohol. As you can see from the picture I had 3 large beers and a bottle of wine.

The reason why I took this photo was to make you think about how much this would cost in Prana. What do you think, £38 for that alone?

Another good thing they got right was the heat of the curry. I asked for an extra hot vindaloo and to be fair it was very challenging.

The papadums here were pretty good. The lime pickle was particularly amazing and had a really good texture to it. Megan is a real lime pickle connoisseur and she loved it. The yogurt was really nice too. Unfortunately, the onion salad was a complete abortion as it was just huge cuts of raw onion and nothing else but the mango chutney was ok.

The rice was disappointing. As you can see from one of the close ups that it just leaked food colouring.

The saag aloo was fairly standard. The onion bahjis were very very basic and the presentation offensive.

We got a basic wet wipe and an After 8 mint afterwards which is all good little extras.

There is a lot Sutton Tandoori gets right. Customer service, spicy curry, a good sauce, and a charming interior…It just can’t do a tasty curry, which is just too fundamental to ignore.

If they could up their meat quality and get rid of the food colouring then I’d put it up there with some of the Ely Indians but otherwise it’s still lagging behind in many ways.