Lifestyle: Restaurant Review – Asha’s, Birmingham

BIRMINGHAM city centre is pretty well off for high-end Indian restaurants these days with the likes of Lasan, Itihaas and Pushkar springing to mind.

Asha’s in Newhall Street is another that has to be classed in this category.

I’ve been there a few times and enjoyed the food and the experience but I’m not really a high-end Indian (let’s call them HEIs for short) sort of chap. Give me a good local tandoori or Balti house any day (most days in fact, judging by my current girth).

I have two main problems with them. Firstly they often try to to drag me down the fusion cooking path which is a path I have no interest in treading. And secondly they are, on the whole, overpriced.

But as I wasn’t paying on a recent visit to Asha’s I was happy to give HEIs another go.

To be fair to Asha’s, it does offer a number of set menu deals for the wallet-conscious but as we were on my companion’s company credit card we decided to go a la carte.

Early on a Thursday evening things were pretty quiet except for a few other diners and the odd barfly. On Friday evenings it’s a different story with scores of young professionals crowding in to the bar area to sample the restaurant’s extensive cocktail selection.

But we weren’t there for the banana mojitos, nor the vanilla champagne, and settled down to peruse the menu.

Deciding to skip starters, after some crispy and fresh poppadums and an interesting selection of pickles (£4.95,) we were straight on to the mains.

I chose Murgh Makhanwala ‘Punjabi Style’, which was half a tandoori chicken on the bone simmered in a ‘Punjabi Makhani’ sauce, flavoured with green chillies and ginger julienne (£15.95).

My dining companion ordered the Chicken Dhabi Curry £15.95), which was a curry flavoured with ginger and garlic, containing toamtoes and onions in a “typical Indian roadside restaurant style”.

And, no, the irony of serving up roadside-style food at £15.95 a portion wasn’t entirely lost on me. 

We also ordered a couple of portions of rice at £4.45 a pop and a plain naan bread (£2.95).

My Murgh Makanwala was excellent. It is such a rare treat to be able to order chicken on the bone in an era when most curries contain breast meat. The combination of fattier, brown meat and a rich sauce is pretty hard to beat in my opinion.

And what a sauce. It was a buttery, sumptuous thing with a good degree of heat. I couldn’t really taste the ginger but I shan’t be losing any sleep over that.

My companion declared his Dhaba Curry delicious and left it at that. He didn’t leave any of his curry, mind, which says more than words ever could.

The portion sizes were good – which isn’t always the case with HEIs – and the rice and naan bread were of top quality, as you would expect in an establishment such as this.

Can I tell the difference between the cooking here and in my local, ahem, roadside restaurant in Solihull? 

Yes I can. There are clearly some highly skilled cooks in action and the blending of herbs and spices to create intense flavours takes it above and beyond what I can get near home, by and large.

But is it worth £15.95 for a main course? Not in my opinion but I do understand that HEIs are always going to be compared with cheaper Indian restaurants whereas the likes of Opus and Metro have no cheaper equivalents in the suburbs.

They are competing against high-end restaurants outside the city centre and top gastro pubs so theirs is a fairly level playing field.

Anyway, it’s good to have a choice and with cooking of the quality I’ve just tasted, I certainly haven’t had a brimful of Asha’s yet.

Just as long as I’m not paying!