One of Ealing’s Best Restaurants Will Bring the Food of New Delhi to the Broadway

Indian restaurant group Patri will open a third site in west London, adding a new opening in Ealing Broadway to its restaurants in Hammersmith and Northfields.

Replacing Italian restaurant La Cantina at 29 Bond Street, just off the main Broadway, this iteration of Patri will focus on the cuisine of New Delhi, where the Northfields branch divides itself between that — with a menu heavily influenced by Mughal cuisine — and the food of Kolkata, in Eastern India, taking it as a terminus from which to stop off at Hakka Chinese and tangra cuisines. On the new menu, “the influence of owner Puneet Wadhwani’s upbringing – whose vegetarian mother married into a non-vegetarian family – is evident throughout, where succulent kebabs and old Delhi meat classics rub shoulders with vegan street food and signature vegetarian dishes based on family recipes.”

At its Northfields restaurant, head chef Govind Singh delivers Mughlai nawabi seekh kebabs that might trouble the gums of the apocryphal toothless Nawab, with both a hum and bristle of cumin and chilli; shahi laal maas whose sauce, deep crimson with mathania chilli, bulwarks hunks of mutton; naan as inflated as a ghee whoopee cushion. There’s a range of of chaats and puris, including Jodhpur’s girlfriend chaat infernal enough to inspire “heard ur boyfriend” memes, and a dal makhani that puts Dishoom’s eulogised version to shame. Indeed, the tag of “artisan street food” — which could induce fear — could do more justice to a restaurant so focussed on balancing pleasure and excellence.

That branch is one of the best restaurants in the Ealing area, whose independents tend to cluster around Northfields and Ealing Common, with Ealing Broadway largely — but not exclusively — a place for chains. With the recently opened Spanish cafe Reineta, natural wine bar Riding Wine Co., and longtime Polish stalwarts Gryf and Sowa, Patri will add to a neighbourhood whose restaurant scene grows ever more interesting, without losing sight of the local communities which it serves.