18 January 2008

Jolly Good Indian


According to our extensive research, Jolly Good Indian is the restaurant on Beaufort Street with the highest street number (1004 Beaufort Street), which gave it the honour of being the first restaurant on our culinary tour.


Jolly Good Indian is in a cute and colourful 1940s house. There are a number of separate rooms to eat in, which gives the place a cosy and homey feel. The fact that it is not a purpose built restaurant is a great change to eating in one cavernous and loud dining room. The toilet is a fascinating trip back to the 1960s when brown swirly tiles were the height of sophistication.


The menu is reasonably short, but every curry lover will find a favourite. It is also extremely well priced - dinner for 4 cost under $100, with plenty of starters. This is a great price for Indian in Perth, as you often pay around $25 for one curry. The other cost saving factor is that the restaurant is BYO, which is brilliant for booze lovers like ourselves. Any place that you feel comfortable taking a 6 pack of VB to gets our thumbs up.


We ordered meat samosas, onion bhaji's and poppadums to start. The Samosas were good, but not brilliant like the samosas you get at Mela in Northbridge (which is an unfair comparison, because they are incredible). The Bhaji's were the perfect crispiness and quite tasty. A poppadum is a poppadum. The odd thing about the starters is that they came with sweet chilli sauce, which is not something we've seen in and Indian restaurant before. A bit of raita or chutney would have been much better.


We had four curries - lamb bhuna marsala, butter chicken, beef vindaloo and chicken madras. They were all very good. The ingrediants were fresh, they were not too salty and the sauces were delicious. We were hoping the beef vindaloo would be hotter than it was, but we did order it '75 per cent hot'. Next time we will definitely go 100% hot. We were given plenty of rice, and when one bowl ran it out it was quickly replaced by another. When the second bowl ran out, we were offered another but by that stage we had eaten ourselves stupid and had to decline.


In summary:


Service: A little slow to start, but then very efficient and friendly all night. We were very well looked after.

Food: Samosas and onion bhajis for starter were nice, although could have done with some more condiments (raita, chutney, pickle etc) for the poppadums. Curries were all very good, although, while tasty, they could possibly have done with a little more heat. (This could have been our fault though for asking for a slightly milder version of the Vindaloo).

Ambience: Cosy converted house with nice lighting. Had a nice feel to it.

Highlight: The talking poppadum.

Lowlight: Sweet chilli sauce being the only accompaniment to the starters.

Rating: 4 poppadums out of 5.
Will we be back? absolutely.
Details: Jolly Good Indian does not have a website. You can call them on 08 9272 2111. The restuarant is BYO and has no EFTPOS facilities.
Coming up: Next week we will be visiting Cafe Mille at 1000 Beaufort Street, Inglewood.


Jolly Good Indian on Urbanspoon

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love your blog,

Keep the reviews rolling!

I have to disagree with your rating of the Jolly Good Indian. I ate there last week and was very disappointed at the quality of the curry. Very watery, very bland, tasted like their main secret spice is tomato ketchup!

I am a Londoner so I know a good curry when I taste one! In my opinion, this was most certainly NOT a Jolly Good Indian!

Beaufort Street Bloggers said...

Hi anonymous. Thanks for your comment, and we're pleased you're enjoying the blog.

Perhaps Jolly Good is a bit hit and miss - The Sponge and The Brains recently went back to Jolly Good Indian for a large work function and found it to be pretty good. You're right that the curries are a bit watery and not terribly spicy, but we think the cheep and cheery atmosphere had us sold.

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