The Emperor’s old clothes
Mark Laba
Province
Santosh Minhas (left) and Song Sirikul with the tandoori chicken, naan bread and chicken kebabs at Akbar’s Own. Photograph by : Nick Procaylo, The Province
AKBAR’S OWN
Where: 1905 West Broadway, Vancouver
Payment/reservations: Major credit cards, 604-736-8180
Drinks: Fully licensed
Hours: Mon.-Sat. lunch, 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; dinner, 5 p.m.-10 p.m., closed Sun.
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Those Mughal emperors really knew how to live. I mean, after all their warring and conquests, palace building and art collecting they truly worked up an appetite befitting empire building and liked to sit down to a great feast.
And, boy, did they know how to dress up a prawn. This crustacean never had it so good until it met up with these patriarchs of India’s history and donned various curried accoutrements as beguiling and intoxicating as a jewelled sari twinkling beneath a setting sun on a prime piece of Goa beachfront.
There’s no place in this city that reproduces this food so consistently as the long-admired Akbar’s Own, named for the famed Mughal ruler. Peaches and I stepped into this serene setting to find just the faintest wisps of sitar music drifting through the room and the kind of muted quiet in which you can hear your bald spot widening. There’s a casual elegance that permeates the place, from the ornately carved wooden chairs to the wall art to the banquette-seating upholstery.
We began our journey through the world of Kashmiri and Mughlai dishes with an order of vegetable ($4) and an order of shrimp pakoras ($8). Served with mint chutney, truly a delightful way to awaken the tastebuds from their meditative slumber and give them the old heave-ho into the rites of spring. The shrimp are especially tasty, anointed with ginger, garlic and sesame seeds before their plunge into the deep-fryer.
Next up: butter chicken because, although an old standby in East Indian restaurants, a lot of places mess it up, the flavour getting sucked down into some murky miasma and the poultry just a sad rendition of a once happy and sprightly chicken with its whole future before it. Not so here. Tender chicken in a creamy tomato-tinged gravy with butter and cream and no oily-surface slick.
Along with this we had the Prawn Masala ($15) and Alu Gobi ($9), two more popular requests for many folks and here they’re done up wonderfully with subtle spicing and moderate heat.
In fact, the sari-wrapped servers never ask how you like your dishes spiced so you take what you get but everything tends towards the moderate. To scoop the stuff up we tried the sesame-seeded moti naan ($2.50).
In the end, I never did taste the Kashmiri dishes because the sauce is studded with grated apples and raisins and I don’t like cooked fruit. It might throw doubt upon my abilities as a food reviewer but, hey, I’ve eaten pig’s ears, snails and tofu baloney, so I figure I can be cut a little slack.
But I will return to try the Fish Mumtaz with a hot-and-sweet sauce spiked with capsicum or the Lamb Badhshhahi ($12.50) that I want to order just to attempt the pronunciation. Truly a majestic feast and, though I may not be an emperor, I am descended from borscht-belt royalty — if you count my Uncle Al in a pink leisure suit doing his Jerry Lewis imitation at bar mitzvahs.
THE BOTTOM LINE
An old caravan route of flavour as consistent as the desert sands.
Grade: Food: A-; Service: A; Atmosphere: B+
© The Vancouver Province 2007
