GRACE AND FLAVOUR

Grace Dent takes a second trip to — and likes it better

The problem with the contemporary Indian restaurant Gymkhana on Albemarle Street — in all its suckling pig vindaloo and tandoori guinea fowl glory — is there are no bloody problems, thus one has to barter one’s first-born in order to secure a table. I’m not sure what the bartering rate is for a ‘love booth’ in Gymkhana’s cellar. And even then one is taking the risk of sitting in a mock colonial dining club jam-packed with restaurant critics, as Gymkhana is the sort of place we indolent puffy-cheeked expense-account whingers lurk, typically strewn in chicken butter masala smears, at 3.30pm on a midweek afternoon, feigning our home-internet connection is kaput and that’s why our column is late. ‘I love deadlines,’ said Douglas Adams. ‘I love the whooshing noise they make as they fly by.’ To which I would add: ‘And I dust the crumbs from a pastry-topped venison biryani off my cleavage’ (or ‘the tit shelf’ as cohorts call it). In the wake of Gymkhana’s success, chef-proprietor Karam Sethi’s other restaurant, the Michelin-starred Trishna on Blandford Street in Marylebone, has been rejigged and redesigned, with new dishes and a revamped wine list. Trishna celebrates the coastal cuisine of southwest India. I visited Trishna a few years ago, just as I took over this column and made it Grace and Flavour, the restaurant dispatch the hospitality world follows avidly, though mainly out of amused bewilderment. I remember I was in Marylebone Village looking for tango shoes before a jaunt to Buenos Aires and ate a slightly sad extended lunch in a cold restaurant with large draughty windows and stripped cave-like walls, which have now been softened with antique mirrors, bronze pendant lighting, marble-top tables and, in places, banquette seating. My main memory is of oddly tepid food, which was followed by a rather humorous sniping bout via Twitter, during which Trishna informed me that its food was beyond reproach, but I simply didn’t understand it. I like