Indian Accent is an Indian restaurant in Albermarle Street, deepest Mayfair, on the site of Rohit Khattar’s Chor Bizarre (‘thieves market’). It follows branches in New York and New Delhi, which featured at no. 9 in the 2016 Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants List, sponsored by S. Pellegrino and Acqua Panna. Apparently you have to mention that, or they shut the water off. The chef is Manish Mehrotra, praised in the New York Times, and a man of growing fame.
Indian Accent offers ‘progressive’ Indian cuisine, which, translated, means you cannot summon the waiter and ask for a secret chicken balti. I call this the Howard Jacobson Experiment, because he does this with more success than I do. The last time I sampled ‘progressive’ Indian cuisine was at Gymkhana, also in Albermarle Street, deepest Mayfair, in 2014. I didn’t like Gymkhana, because the chicken was semi-cooked, there was no secret chicken balti and the decoration was a glut of Raj Chic: there was an engraving of wilting English people carried around by Indians, as if they were chairs.
I am not a woman to pull a portrait of Theresa May off the wall of the geography department in Oxford because I feel oppressed by her smile — that would make me an idiot, and I like my political acts to have more meaning than rearranging furniture. But Gymkhana was too oblivious to the past to do well in the present: if you don’t care about people, how can you care about food? It felt like Madame Tussauds with papadums, and the food was scarcely better than wax. I was trolled online for writing that, possibly by bots, and I was pleased.
Indian Accent is very different to Gymkhana, thankfully; I would spend my own money here, and I would bring my friends for lunch.
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