Kayal on Broadway, excellent Southern Indian Fare- my tagline “Five went to eat Thali”

Kayal in Nottingham serves up classic Southern Indian fare, describing it as ‘Kerala Backwater Cuisine’. I do love this type of food and I have blogged once before about this place when I came here late one evening on one of those “works leaving do’s” – Read about that here ‘Kayal in Nottingham – Backwater Cuisine on the Broadway’

I kind of felt that even though we got a good taste of the place, there was a little bit of unfinished business, (if I am honest I needed to try their food sober.).

I was looking forward to seeing what they had to offer at a more respectable hour of the day so I was delighted that we were heading back here.

We came here for a bit of a holiday season outing, a little bit of a lunchtime jolly with good friends from work, we had already read about the Business lunch for $5.95, which sounded to be great value, we knew that it included a choice from a couple of curries and a side dish, so we were expecting some kind of mini buffet situation, but we had no idea that it was a Thali, which was an excellent and most pleasing discovery!

This was pretty much terrific! haven’t used that word on a food blog post for a while, it was so unexpected a treat and so much in keeping with the moment and with the make up of our team.

There were five of us, and we all ordered the Thali, Four of us have been dining at the better and perhaps lesser known curry houses in the city for a while, one of us was from Hyderabad, two of us had lived in Hyderabad, three of us lived in places far and flung, three of us love ping pong (random fact of the day), we all loved this meal!

Lunchtime Thali at Kayal

The plain dosa was excellent, it was both a ‘filler’ and a ‘dipper’, I do like a masala dosa when you get a bit of spicy potato inside, but to be honest I was able to mix my dosa with the lovely little bit of lightly spiced potato from pot number 4 so all was well in the world.

I also enjoyed dipping my dosa into the vegetable curry (pot 2) and the yellow lentil daal (pot 3). The vegetable curry was a bit on the thin side, perhaps a little watery, but it had a nice gentle warming spice hit, and a sweet peppery and tomato based gravy. There were bits of green bean, potato, tomato, okra and more in the pot, very simple and all of which worked well together.

I loved the yellow split lentil daal, it has become one of my favorite indian sides over recent times, it is not that spicy, but it is kind of creamy and mixes so well with the rice.

In those times when you have no cutlery and you are eating with your hands, it works perfectly.

The chicken curry was also pretty tasty, it was kind of a coconut green curry sauce gravy with a couple of cubes of chicken, it was really tasty.

I had quite a few Thali earlier in the year when I travelled across India and I started to love that clean purity from a vegetarian platter, so I had been a bit dubious about having one with meat in, as I was worried it might take over. I had no worries, it fitted in very well with the experience.

I was a bit uncertain about the potato dish, it had nice flavour, but I have had much better cumin potato or Aloo Jeera dishes on other Thali plates in the past, so I think part of me was hankering after something like that instead. Oh well I suppose I cannot get everything that I want, all of the time 🙂

This was a great meal and a great lunch, sometimes these Thali are too big in the UK and they try to pass it off as some sort of a sharing platter, here though at Kayal they know what they are doing as set you up with your own personal meal packed with all sorts of super tasty little treats and morsels.

Recommend to the max!

It was very, very good indeed! and I cannot help but think if people knew it was a Thali then the place would be mobbed out,

I mean £5.95 is great value (in the UK) for this type of lunch!